Analysis of Fog Water Collection in Daly City and the North Coast County Water District

Communities
Tatum Bachmeier, Dario Conti, Melissa Diaz-Rios, Jennifer Lagunas Garcia, Gaby Padilla • Applied Environmental Sciences • CSU
Monterey Bay

Background Conclusions
• Fog input, an essential contributor to the • We successfully collected data from four sites,
maintenance of ecosystems, can be used as some for 3 months, others for about 2 months.
an additional water source for our
• The site that seemed the most productive over
communities1
this time period was Milagra
• A fog collector is a device that catches water • The Daly City location showed the lowest
droplets from the rolling fog amount of fog during this time period
• A fog collector is essentially a large mesh net. • Increasing the size of the collectors will
Water droplets build up as the fog rolls increase the amount of water collected from fog
through the net and falls into the trough (and rain).
below it. After reaching the trough, the water
flows into a bucket where its volume is • Some data was lost due to equipment failure.
recorded.
• Water collected from the fog catchers can be
stored in a tank or released directly from the References
collector to a desired area nearby.
• We set out to explore fog collection as an 1 Domen, J.K., Stringfellow, W.T., Camarillo, M.K., et al. Fog water as an
additional potable water source within our alternative and sustainable water resource. Clean Techn Environ Policy 16,
235–249 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-013-0645-z
partnered municipalities: Daly City and the 2 SFPUC (November 10,2021). San Francisco Declares Water Shortage Emergency
North Coast County Water District in Response to Statewide Drought. Office of the Mayor.
Figure 1: Christen Figure 2: Average amount of fog collected by https://sfmyor.org/article/San-Francisco-declares-water-shortage-emergency-resp
onse-statewide-drought
Hill fog collector each site per month in liters
Methods
• Deployed four fog catchers across the Pacifica Christen Milagra
and Daly City municipalities fog Christen Royce fog Royce fog Milagra Daly fog Daly
○ Christen Hill, Milagra Ridge, Royce, and
catcher 'pure' fog catcher Pure fog catcher 'pure' fog catcher 'pure' fog
Daly City
• Measured fog water collected during a three-
month period from all four sites Figure 4: Fog
Water 200.93L 185.85L 56.43L 25.38L 275.23L 230.00L 1.75L 0.12L
• Compiled the amount of water collected per catcher sites from
day in a spreadsheet collected
(liters)
top to bottom:
• Separated the fog data from the overall water
collected. This gave two categories titled “fog
catcher” and “pure fog” - Daly City
Total 91 91 61 61 67 67 99 99 - Christen Hill
days data - Milagra
Discussion were Ridge
recorded
• Fog collection can provide new opportunities to - Royce
obtain non-potable water water. This is particularly
true for the drier seasons, when fog is most likely
to occur. Daily 2.18L 2.02L 0.91L 0.41L 4.05L 3.38L 0.02L 0.00L
average
• The average person in San Francisco uses 42
gallons per day2. Using the data from the Milagra water
Ridge site, one person would require 54 fog collected
catchers.
(liters)
Figure 3: Represents the overall data that was collected in liters.