Uncategorized – Fog Water Harvesting Solutions for Coastal California

09/24/202410/23/2024

Events: Fog Fest 2024

Fog Fest 2024 is a free event and will celebrate the end of fog season with tours of the fog water collectors, fog garden, and presentations by scientists, artists, and community members. If you work on coastal climate issues, water conservation, or you just love fog, this event will be informative and showcase the rich interdisciplinary collaborations that have been formed around and in the fog.

Come to the event and you will learn how to build your own fog collector.

Dinner will be served at the Farm Center House and there will be presentations on art+fog.

Donations will be accepted to cover the cost of dinner, suggested $25 per person. Please RSVP for the event and for the dinner here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfz3K7CjFdCgpAfPA7Yi8Cf4wYlGR9RNRRk-ba_Bv80FvKf0w/viewform?usp=sf_link

Exact Location:

05/26/202409/24/2024

Climate Action Solutions Business Incubator Award

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.

Dr. Peter Weiss and his students explain their accomplishments from the summer of 2023 where they built a Large Fog Collector and a Fog Tree at the UCSC Farm. Their end of the fog season celebration called Fog Fest was celebrated in October of 2023.

05/24/202407/01/2024

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.

Heatmap of Mean CLCF % from May to Sept. 1996 to 2020, showing gradients from blue (lower percentages) to red (higher percentages) along coastlines.

05/06/202407/01/2024

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.

09/14/202307/01/2024

Fog Tree: Functional art project for garden education

Individual in a light grey t-shirt with a name tag, standing next to a wooden structure with vertical strings, outdoors in a grassy field.

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.

08/28/202307/01/2024

The Fog Tree Trunk has been set in concrete at the LifeLab garden

Vertical wooden pole on a circular concrete base in an outdoor field.

Thanks to Lizette (and her dad) and Alan for the hard work. Now we install the branches and strands.

08/24/202307/01/2024

The first stage of building the Fog Tree at UCSC LifeLab

Two people standing next to a tall wooden pole set into a circular excavation in a rural area with fields and trees in the background.

08/16/202307/01/2024

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.