Adaptive Hydraulics (AdH) is a fully three-dimensional, space and time adaptive, finite-element solver with modules for 2D/3D shallow water equations with sediment and constituent transport, Navier-Stokes equations, and coupled heat and mass transport in soils simulated via the Richards equation and the heat equation. It is used for a variety of applications including studies of inland waterways and control structures, compound flooding scenarios involving tidal, riverine, and overland flow, and providing soil temperature predictions within a suite of tools used to generate synthetic infrared imagery, which is the focus of current work. Herein, we discuss the initial development of a preCICE adapter to enable partitioned physics coupling between AdH instances in the context of thermal coupling between a buried object and surrounding soil domain using a Dirichlet-Neumann formulation together with the shifted boundary method to alleviate body-fitted grid generation requirements. We show that this combination of partitioned physics coupling and embedded boundary method reduces the effort needed to prepare scenes for thermal simulation, and allow us to capture thermal conditions which traditionally require complex mesh boolean operations for objects which are not fully embedded in the soil domain. Initial results for the buried object problem will be presented along with our vision of potential future uses of preCICE within AdH.