The Weiss Lab at UC Santa Cruz was awarded a grant to develop products and a marketplace for fog water harvesting.
Learn about our projects through this video.
Hotspots for Fog Water Harvesting
Fog water is available for harvest on our foggy California coast, as shown by the Coastal Low Clouds and Fog (CLCF) frequency map below. Using these data plus wind speeds and elevation we can predict where the fog water harvesting hot spots are. This modeling work is some of the current research happening in the Weiss Lab.
Large Fog Collector (LFC) – Atmospheric Water Harvesting for Veggie Garden Irrigation
The passive LFC can collects fog water from the air and directs this water to an irrigation system. Our demonstration Fog Garden at the UCSC Farm consists of 24 vegetable plants. In the summer of 2023, the fog water collected supplied 37% of our garden’s water needs.
Fog Tree: Functional art project for garden education
The Fog Tree is an aesthetically pleasing tree-like structure with fog catching “branches” that collect fog water and direct it towards plants in a garden.
The Fog Tree Trunk has been set in concrete at the LifeLab garden
Thanks to Lizette (and her dad) and Alan for the hard work. Now we install the branches and strands.
The first stage of building the Fog Tree at UCSC LifeLab
The Fog Garden
We have collected 46 gallons of water since Jun 15 (61 days). It’s only 0.11 L/m2/d, far below the threshold for a fog supersite (~1 L/m2/d). Santa Cruz is in a partial fog shadow due to the southerly exposure to the ocean. Northwest is the best. Despite the reduced liquid water content of the air, we have collected enough water to make a meaningful difference in the growing of our vegetable garden.
Fog collection totals 6/15/23 to 8/15/23
176 liters or 46 gallons! This was collected on 26m2 of mesh area over a period of 61 d, resulting in fog deposition flux of 0.11 L/m2/d
Impressive fog harvesting volumes 8-8-23
Field testing the Autonomous Fog Collector
The AFC v 1.0 is being field tested at the Whale Point meteorological station at Big Creek Reserve. This device senses environmental conditions including visibility with a MiniOFS to detect fog events, open the doors to the chamber, and turn on the fan which pulls fog across the strands.
