NEARBY USDA SCAN MEASUREMENTS
Look up the latest soil-temperature observations from the nearest USDA monitoring station with recent data. The station is a real measurement location, which may be some distance from your address.
Enter a U.S. street address or a 5-digit ZIP code.
Soil temperature influences how quickly seeds germinate, whether young roots can grow, and how active soil organisms are. Air temperature changes quickly when clouds, wind, or a front arrives. Soil warms and cools more gradually, and the change depends on depth, moisture, soil texture, vegetation, shade, and recent weather. A soil reading can therefore answer a different question from a forecast or the temperature shown by a nearby air-weather station.
Many planting guides use a soil thermometer at about four inches for decisions such as when to sow warm-season crops. Use the four-inch SCAN reading as regional context, then check the recommendation for the particular crop and measure your own bed when timing matters. The tool also shows observations at two, eight, twenty, and forty inches when the station reports them. Shallow soil often responds sooner to sun and overnight cooling; deeper soil generally changes more slowly. These depths describe the sensor positions at the station, not a vertical profile measured in your yard.
The lookup searches a bundled list of USDA SCAN station locations and sorts them by straight-line distance from the point we geocoded. It checks recent readings starting with the closest candidates and selects the nearest station with usable, sufficiently recent soil-temperature data. The result names that station, reports its distance, and displays each depth’s observation time and age. If a station has no recent readings at a particular depth, that depth is marked as unavailable; the tool does not fill it with an estimate.
Measurements are made at the station installation. A station several miles away can sit at a different elevation, soil type, slope, land cover, or exposure than your property. Distance is useful context, but it does not capture every difference between sites. SCAN stations are concentrated in monitored areas rather than evenly spaced across every community, so some lookups may use a distant station or return no recent reading. Treat farther-away observations as broader regional context, not as a precise measurement of your garden or field.
SCAN sensors collect observations hourly, but communications and quality-control processes can delay what appears in AWDB. Each result includes the latest observation timestamp and its age, and the lookup only selects a station with an observation from the last 24 hours. That freshness rule cannot guarantee that a reading is error-free or representative. A station may report only some depths, readings can be flagged or revised by the data provider, and the tool shows the values returned by AWDB without independently calibrating the instruments. For planting decisions, compare the station reading with a thermometer in the soil you will plant and follow crop-specific extension guidance.
Tomatoes are warm-season plants. Many gardening references advise waiting until soil is consistently around 60°F or warmer before transplanting, but local extension recommendations and overnight air temperatures matter too. A nearby station reading is context; check the temperature in your own planting bed.
No. The temperature is measured at the named SCAN station. The result gives the straight-line distance so you can judge how local that observation may be.
The closest station may not have recent soil-temperature data. The lookup checks the next closest stations and selects the closest one with a usable observation from the last 24 hours.
A ZIP-only search uses the representative coordinate for its Census ZIP Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA), not a ZIP’s boundary or your exact location. Some USPS ZIP codes, such as unique or PO-box ZIPs, are not represented in the bundled Census dataset.
Not every station has sensors at every depth, and individual sensors can stop reporting. Each available reading includes its own timestamp and age; an unavailable depth is left blank rather than estimated.
Compare station readings with county-level mapped soil references:
Data source: USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, Soil Climate Analysis Network (SCAN), through the Air and Water Database (AWDB). SCAN readings are station measurements and should not be treated as site-specific observations.