An attention-aware LSTM model for soil moisture and soil temperature prediction

•A novel attention-aware LSTM model (ILSTM_Soil) is developed for soil prediction.•The temporal and predictor’s importances are widely investigated.•The interpretation of attention weights coincides well with physical knowledge.•ILSTM_Soil model outperforms other existing predictive models in most cases.•Attention mechanism is advocated for better performance and interoperability.