Latest News

  • 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.

    https://youtu.be/luMUnT1kYo4
    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.

  • 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.
  • 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.

    https://youtu.be/9BLHuymTpDI
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.
  • 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