This study was conducted to figure out temperature profiles of a partially developed paddy rice canopy, which are necessary to run plant disease forecasting models. Air temperature over and within the developing rice canopy was monitored from one month after transplanting (June 29) to just before heading (August 24) in 1999 and 2001. During the study period, the temporal march of the within-canopy profile was analyzed and an empirical formula was developed for simulating the profile. A partially developed rice canopy temperature seemed to be controlled mainly by the ambient temperature above the canopy and the water temperature beneath the canopy, and to some extent by the solar altitude, resulting in alternating isothermal and inversion structures. On sunny days, air temperature at the height of maximum leafages was increased at the same rate as the ambient temperature above the canopy after sunrise. Below the height, the temperature increase was delayed until the solar noon. Air temperature near the water surface varied much less than those of the outer- and the upper-canopy, which kept increasing by the time of daily maximum temperature observed at the nearby synoptic station. After sunset, cooling rate is much less at the lower canopy, resulting in an isothermal profile at around the midnight. A fairly consistent drop in temperature at rice paddies compared with the nearby synoptic weather stations across geographic areas and time of day was found. According to this result, a cooling by 0.6 to 1.2$^{circ}C$ is expected over paddy rice fields compared with the officially reported temperature during the summer months. An empirical equation for simulating the temperature profile was formulated from the field observations. Given the temperature estimates at 150 cm above the canopy and the maximum deviation at the lowest layer, air temperature at any height within the canopy can be predicted by this equation. As an application, temperature surfaces at several heights within rice fields were produced over the southwestern plains in Korea at a 1 km by 1km grid spacing, where rice paddies were identified by a satellite image analysis. The outer canopy temperature was prepared by a lapse rate corrected spatial interpolation of the synoptic temperature observations combined with the hourly cooling rate over the rice paddies.