Alternative Water Resources: Fog collection
What you need to know about why the materials you use matter
Danijela Jozinovic, Hayli A. Stewart & Daniel Fernandez
School of Applied Environmental Science, California State University, Monterey Bay, Seaside, CA
Background
Fog is composed of numerous water droplets that
come in contact with the ground. The water in the fog
can be collected and used for a variety of purposes.
This research has value because fog collection has
the potential to be a supplemental water resource.
Collectors are most efficient when faced
perpendicular to oncoming wind. There are several
types of mesh that can be used when collecting fog.
The standard mesh size is one square meter with a
double layer of Raschel mesh. We compared its
performance to that of a single and triple layer of this
material.The standard Raschel mesh can be among
the most effective for collecting fog water
(Schemenauer 1994). The Raschel mesh can only be
purchased from Chile, South America. We sought to
compare not only the three different layers of Raschel
mesh but also one manufactured in Germany, which
we referred to as German mesh, and another from a
hardware store, that we refer to as Home Depot
mesh. We aimed to collect more insight on which of
the specified meshes collected the most water over a
span of time.
Methods
Each collector has a matching rain gauge that tips a
certain number of times for each liter of water that
passes through it. The number of tips associated with
each liter for each bucket is known as the bucket’s
calibration. The calibration for the buckets we used
in this project ranged from 118 tips to 274 tips per
liter. These calibration values were used to
determine the amount of water that each mesh
collected by dividing the number of tips each rain
gauge produces by the associated bucket’s
calibration value. By pursuing the data from the past
several years, we located the periods of time when
and locations where the mesh of interest were
deployed. Data formats varied and were made
consistent in order to be run through the R analysis
Code. We then ran the data through R Code to
determine the volumes of water that each mesh
collected for each fog event analyzed.
Results Analysis
Fritzsche Field
● At Fritzsche Field the standard double layer
Fritzsche Field raschel mesh collected 0.04 more liters than the
Home Depot mesh for the four events we
tracked.
● However, the Home Depot mesh collected more
water during Events- 1, 2, and 4.
● The data show that the standard double layer
Raschel mesh did not significantly outperform
the Home Depot mesh.
Solar Field
● Overall, the standard double layer Raschel mesh
performed the best at this site for the events we
analyzed.
● For these events, the German mesh performed
August 7th, 2018 1:15am- 10th, 2018 9am second best, followed by the triple layer Raschel
mesh and, finally, by the single layer Raschel
mesh.
Conclusions
While we observed small differences between the
different types of mesh, within the events observed,
the differences did not appear to be significant. Future
research will look more at fog events and
accompanying meteorological data to seek to better
understand why some mesh perform better than others
in different conditions.
Acknowledgments
Research reported in this poster presentation was
funded by the National Science Foundation, HSI Pilot
Project: Inclusive and Integrative STEM Education
through Undergraduate Research Grant under award
number #2122243 through California State University,
Monterey Bay's Undergraduate Research Opportunity
Center. Also, thanks to Hangar One Distillery for their
generous contributions to this work.
Thank you to Dr. Daniel Fernandez and past UROC
researchers for earlier deployments and data collection.
References
Schemenauer, Robert & Cereceda, Pilar. (1994). A
Proposed Standard Fog Collector for Use in
High-Elevation Regions. Journal of Applied
Meteorology. 33. 1313-132.