The University of Maine is using $3.5 million in federal community project funding to build a statewide automated weather station network to provide timely warnings of severe weather, improve weather forecasts, help farmers and foresters, and create a long-term climate record.

“The more weather data we collect, the better our forecasts will be,” said Sean Birkel, a UMaine assistant professor and state climatologist. “The main goal of the (network) is to improve forecasts and assist decision-making for agriculture and forestry, but there are many applications.”

The 26 stations will take an array of meteorological readings, from precipitation and soil moisture to air and soil temperature to solar radiation and barometric pressure. The first one will be built in the spring near Orono to allow the project team to tweak station design and learn to service them.

The stations will range between 10 and 30 feet tall and help farmers and foresters manage frost, drought and wildfire risks, among other challenges. The tall towers will be deployed in areas where pesticide spraying or biological control methods would be rendered ineffective by windy conditions.

Over time, each Maine county will have at least one station. Project leaders are still deciding where to install the other 10 stations, but most will be placed in agricultural areas or forests, with perhaps an island or mountaintop station included to add geographic detail to the state climate record.

The university hopes to find funding to expand the system in the future. It also welcomes groups that want to buy and operate their own weather station to join the network, as long as the equipment is research-grade and the group is willing to sign an agreement to share their data.

The network will help fill in gaps in Maine’s weather observation landscape. Maine has a handful of stations taking readings at local airports or monitoring road conditions, but that leaves parts of Maine without real-time weather readings to inform satellite and radar-based forecasts.

Maine is especially lacking in soil temperature and moisture data, Birkel said. There are only two stations collecting daily year-round soil readings now, one in Old Town and one in Presque Isle. A few stations collect soil data in blueberry growing areas, but only during the growing season.

The UMaine network data will eventually be published online in real time. A farmer might use ground temperature data to decide whether to cover a crop to protect it from frost damage. A forester might use wind data to decide when to spray pesticide on a burgeoning spruce budworm hot spot.

Other groups may find the data useful, too, Birkel said, including those who love to ski, hike, hunt or fish, and the growing outdoor recreation industry that serves them. A ski resort doesn’t want to make snow if a fog is coming. A hiker doesn’t want to summit Katahdin if a storm is brewing.

And if that hiker gets hurt, authorities need precise weather information to map out a rescue plan.

In other states, contractors have used the real-time data to decide which job site to work and which to protect from the elements. For example, concrete won’t cure properly in extreme heat or cold. Wood will warp in high humidity. And heavy rains can flood construction sites and damage machinery.

The public data will include all the information collected over time from each site. Eventually, that will build a detailed state climate record, which will be especially important if the future is as warm, wet and wild as predicted. By 2050, temperatures will rise up to 4 degrees and seas by 1.5 feet.

Once it is up and running, the UMaine network will join a national system of weather station networks that supply the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with the real-time observational data needed to formulate National Weather Service forecasts, Birkel said.

The project will be bankrolled by community project funding, or what used to be called an earmark, which is congressional funding for a specific local project. Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King requested that the project be added to the 2024 federal budget.

The project team is made up of Birkel and colleagues from the UMaine Extension Office and School of Biology and Ecology: Bee Chim, Lily Calderwood and Phillip Fanning. Calderwood is the one who came up with the idea to request the funding for the weather station, Birkel said.

The $3.5 million will fund the stations as well as the hiring of a full-time network manager with a background in applied meteorology, a data scientist to create the public interface, and one or two field technicians, one of which might be a student, to manage the data and service the system.