Water infiltration into frozen soil is a crucial process in many parts of the world as more than 50% of the exposed land in the Northern Hemisphere are experiencing seasonally frozen soils (T. Zhang et al., 2003). Frozen soil has a significantly reduced infiltration capacity depending on the ice content compared to unfrozen soil and therefore infiltration and surface runoff substantially depend on the ice content in the soil (Mohammed et al., 2018). If the liquid water cannot infiltrate into the soil, erosion and substantial surface water runoff might take place causing landslides and debris flow (Seyfried & Murdock, 1997). Also, the contribution of snowmelt to the groundwater resources can be an important factor in regions with otherwise little soil water storage (Hood & Hayashi, 2015). With the snow melt, contaminants originally stored in the snow are transported by the meltwater and infiltrate into groundwater resources (e.g., Feng et al., 2001;Jones et al., 1989). If water infiltrates into the soil and then freezes, frost heave might occur and damage roads, train tracks, pipelines and other critical infrastructure. In general, the vadose zone experiences complex interactions between soil, water, and air with chemical and biological activity within the vadose zone strongly effected by temperature and the availability of liquid water (Hayashi, 2013). Therefore, understanding the flow behavior under freezing conditions and the thermal interaction between soil and infiltrating water is crucial for hazard prevention and groundwater management. The thermal state of the involved phases is key for the hydraulic processes.Water infiltration into frozen soil is a multi-phase scenario with an -at least initially -local thermal non-equilibrium (LTNE) between the involved phases because the infiltrating water has a temperature above the freezing point, while the soil and its pore filling are frozen. LTNE situations are well-known for a saturated porous matrix (Gossler et al., 2020;Hamidi et al., 2019) and the LTNE concept has been recently extended to partially saturated soils (Heinze & Blöcher, 2019). In the context of geothermal energy exploration, the LTNE concept has gained more and more attention due to the obvious limitations and the oversimplification of models assuming local thermal equilibrium (LTE) (e.g., Gelet et al., 2013;Shaik et al., 2011;C. Xu et al., 2015). LTE models are based on the volumetric weighting of thermal parameters of the involved