AUBURN — Weather watchers can once again get accurate condition reports for the Twin Cities and surroundings, now that the official weather station at the Auburn-Lewiston Municipal Airport is back online.

The automatic weather station at the airport failed May 5. Airport Director Rick Lanman said the station, which reports immediate weather information for pilots, is owned and operated by the Federal Aviation Administration.

“What happened was the motherboard of the system crashed,” Lanman said. “It’s no surprise, because it was 10 years old, and it took a couple of weeks to get the part in.”

The weather station was back in service May 20.

The FAA’s system also reports official temperatures to the National Weather Service office in Gray. Meteorologist Mike Kistner said people trying to pull up local reports couldn’t get them.

“They’d try to get their local weather and all they’d see is ‘N/A’,” Kistner said. “So they called us, and figured our system was down.”

Kistner said the weather service relied on weather stations in Portland and Augusta to fill out local forecasts and data from private weather watchers helped round things out.

But Kistner said May’s weather has been mild, except for a few frost days. The local weather report outage could have happened at a much worse time, he said.

“We generally don’t have a ton of weather in May and this year it’s been very, very dry,” he said. “We tend to use those stations most when we are issuing severe storm warnings. If a storm were to pass over the airport, that’s a really good observation to have. It can give us a better idea what is really happening under that storm. So, this didn’t affect our operation too much.”

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