Head in the Clouds: The Dream of Harvesting Water from Fog (the re-post)

The following was published June 8, 2017, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which now appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.org. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.
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FogQuest volunteer Chris Fogliatti, San Francisco, California, 2016.
Photo: Hangar 1 Vodka.

The fog comes/ on little cat feet, wrote Carl Sandburg. We here in the San Francisco Bay Area follow it on Twitter under the name Karl the Fog. It seems like a sentient being that winters on the water and summers on the land.It contributes a gentle touch to the atmosphere, keeping coastal plants and animals living within their narrow comfort zone. It is the natural air conditioning for coast-siders. It is the preferred summer water source for Sequoia sempervirens—coast redwood—the world’s tallest
tree (Limm et al. 2009). Throughout history fog has also been tapped to generate drinking water, such as the harvesting of fog-drip from trees using cisterns in the Canary Islands.

There are also many varied modern efforts at tapping fog water for human use. One example with mixed results began in 1985 in Canada. An atmospheric physicist at Environment Canada named Dr. Robert Schemenauer was approached by an international aid agency with this question: can fog be used for water supply in the desert in Chile? His “proof of technology” project resulted in the world's first large operational fog collection project being built at El Tofo, Chile. It served the nearby coastal community of Chungungo from 1992 until 2003. The project delivered 15,000 liters of fog water per day on average, some days delivering over 100,000 liters. The size of the community doubled as a result. After 10 years of successful water production, the community leaders abandoned the fog collectors, eventually building their own desalination plant. The caretaker for their 100 large fog collectors was let go, and the collectors decayed. In an article about this shift away from fog collection, a representative of the aid agency that began this project, the International Development Research Centre, reflected: “people have certain visions of what it means to be developed, and one of them is that water should be brought to you by the state, and you should never have to think about it.”

Although the Chungungo project did not continue, Dr. Schemenauer, one of the founders of modern fog collection, persists in his work helping establish fog-water systems for isolated high-country communities in the developing world through FogQuest, the NGO he co-founded in 2000. He makes community engagement a priority in his projects.

Access to drinkable water is a growing problem for communities across the world. When the right conditions exist, fog collectors in Guatemala allow villagers access to cheap water that is available immediately. Photo: Girl and baby donkey, Tojquia, Guatemala, 2008. FogQuest/Melissa Rosato. Used with permission. (Source.)

FogQuest’s 1 m² “standard fog catcher” uses a special polyethylene mesh (called Raschel mesh) that is both effective at capturing fog droplets and is wind-resistant. One of the longest-running (since 2006) and successful FogQuest collection arrays is located in Tojquia, Guatemala, where 35 large (40 m²) collectors trap 7,000 liters (1,849 gallons) of water a day during the winter dry season (FogQuest 2017). Dr. Schemenauer points to that project as having a “bright future” in part because of its robust maintenance regime. Other current projects include other sites in the highlands of Chile (the Atacama Desert Center and Falda Verde), Ethiopia, Nepal, Eritrea, and Morocco (read a 2016 update about this project: Fog harvesting brings water to Morocco’s rural communities, which combines FogQuest collectors and a newer German design created for high wind environments).

Fog collection pilot projects have also been undertaken by many other institutions around the world, including through the University of South Africa. The South African collectors were adapted for local weather conditions: “instead of having one flat vertical panel, we now put three panels (30 m² each) in the form of a triangle […] provid[ing] stability to the system during storms,” per a 2013 report.

What is fog and how will climate change affect it?

For most purposes, fog is a cloud that touches the ground. There are different types of fog. One way some types form when warm, moist air passes over a cool surface, causing water vapor to condense on tiny particles (called condensation nuclei). But historically the presence of fog has been measured at airports with regards to navigation (officially, “fog” is present when visibility is less than 1 km), so fog scientists trying to understand how climate change and other factors are affecting fog in, for example, coast redwood habitat have to interpolate trends from airport data which aren’t tailored to their purposes. Fog also doesn’t collect as water in uniform ways: wind and the composition of droplets change how it gathers on collectors. The science of determining the optimal places for fog collection and the optimal collector construction is still being developed through modeling and trial and error.

The question of how climate change is affecting fog is highly unresolved, and probably will be for some time. Some researchers speculate it is declining (see the Johnstone and Dawson 2010 study that shows a 33% decline in summertime fog hours off the coast of California), some that it is intensifying. In any case, the atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial systems that produce fog are highly variable and undergoing changes: their future interactions can’t be projected with much certainty.

Ideal conditions for a bumper crop of fog

For the best water production, fog collectors should be constructed perpendicular to the prevailing wind. Drops will form on the mesh and then fall into a trough that is angled to fill a tank. On average, a fog collector of the sort built by FogQuest will produce 3-15 liters (about 1-4 gallons) per day per m². If the fog event is especially productive, the collector may yield 50 liters (about 13 gallons) per m² in one day. (Source.)

Fog water harvesting schematic.
Adapted from article by Poulpeaction.org
"Captation d’eau de brouillard"/FogQuest. 

You can’t get these results by hoisting up a fog collector in any back yard. Fog collectors are most productive in high mountains very close to the ocean. One report from South Africa specifies the following requirements for a viable fog collection project in local conditions:

• It must be in an area where fog events are frequent year-round and last several hours.

• It must be at least 1,000 m above sea level and receive at least 90 days of fog precipitation per year.

• The water content of the fog must be high.

• There must be wind with the fog to ensure a minimum volume of air blown through collectors.

The fog collector mesh has a 10 year life span. For a large collector of 40 m² the cost of the standard fog collector mesh and the poles and cables that comprise the frame is between $1,000-1,500 USD. The structure on which it is suspended is flexible in wind storms and earthquakes, so it is relatively easy to put back into place after a natural disturbance. There is no permanent infrastructure required (e.g., no concrete slabs necessary, no electrical cables for pumps): maintenance is relatively cheap, consisting of replacing worn out mesh or damaged pipes, cables, troughs, or water containers. Although it is relatively cheap, a commitment must be made to maintenance, as Chungungo exemplified.

To get ahead of that obstacle, Dr. Schemenauer recommends prioritizing connecting the local people to the project:  “The success of projects depends on having people in the community involved right from the beginning, before you put a fog collector up.”

Dr. Schemenauer emphasizes the importance of involving women and children—the whole community, showing them the concept and starting with a test structure (a 1x1m Standard Fog Collector, for example) as a demonstration. If materials are scarce, a simple mosquito net can work for a proof-of-concept demonstration. The initial construction of fog collectors is relatively easy compared to long-term maintenance, so the sustainability of a fog collector project hinges on local buy-in.

Your new California coastal utility: CalFog?

As romantic as it would be, fog is not likely to ever be a viable source of new water for human consumption in cities, especially not in the developed world with its high-demand user habits. Ultimately fog water requires too much effort and expense for the quantity of water needed. The lifestyle of urban water users would have to change and the cost of fresh water from inland sources would have to skyrocket (and/or quality would have to plummet) to make a utility-scale fog collection project make sense for a city.

In isolated coastal areas where the two main alternative water sources are fog collection and desalination (as in Chungungo), the people who run the desalination plants are unlikely to be equipped to operate a hybrid system integrating both sources: it will be one or the other. If commitment to local maintenance is already a problem, the relative unreliability of fog water compared to desalination might be a deciding factor. Also, if a community has never tried fog harvesting, it will face the problem of any new public infrastructure project (e.g., the questions associated with building water storage basins, how to support collection and maintenance, etc.).

The optimal place for fog water collection for human water needs is a high mountain/ coastal community with a small, isolated population with low water demand, as in the examples above.

The next most cost-effective use might be for agriculture such is in Falda Verde near Chañaral, Chile, where fog water supports a commercial aloe vera plantation through drip irrigation (Carter et al. 2007). The project there is aiming at integrating a fog-fed fish farm, the water from which would add fertilizer to the plantation (aquaponics), according to Dr. Daniel Fernandez, who visited the site in March 2017. Majada Blanca, Chile, has an experimental olive farm fed exclusively with fog water (with a goal of selling fog-fed olive oil to advertise the technique). Its first harvest took place in May 2017.

FogQuest volunteer Chris Fogliatti suggested another drip irrigation system might take the form of fog-collecting mesh installed around an individual native tree sapling. He suggests this might be a useful approach to watering landscaping at high altitudes along the coast; fog water could also be used to feed hydroponic operations producing California’s newly legalized cash crop, marijuana.

Is it safe to drink fog water?

Fog water tends to be of high quality, although it should be subjected to regular testing and filtration if it is being consumed by humans.

There is a concern about bioaccumulation of mercury in coastal animals due to fog exposure. According to Peter Weiss-Penzias at UC Santa Cruz, it appears that mercury levels, on average, are ten times higher in coastal mountain lion whiskers than those found inland. The fog these animals live in can be 20 times more polluted with mercury than rain. This is not a concern for humans, since the amounts are too small to affect humans and we don’t consume anything that consumes fog, but it might be a concern for the long-term health of animals in coastal habitats.

“Fodka” and other adventures with fog

In 2016 the San Francisco Bay Area distiller Hangar 1 debuted Fog Point, a new vodka using local fog water—or fodka (see a 30-second 2016 Time video about it). All proceeds are committed to the charitable mission of FogQuest and fog science. Chile has a “Fog Catcher” (Atrapaniebla) beer, made with only fog water, brewed in one of the driest places in the world, the Atacama Desert (read a 2015 BBC story about the brewery and the research project associated with it).

Projects bringing together art and fog collection are proliferating around the world, such as the Fog Garden (“Jardin de Niebla”) project by Pilar Cereceda and Rodrigo Perez de Arce, piloted in 2008 in Alto Patache in Chile’s Atacama Desert. It was unfortunately abandoned due to lack of funding after the Santiago earthquake in 2010.

The future of fog

Johnstone and Dawson’s 2010 study illustrating a decline in California’s coastal fog has been widely discussed and questioned. Meanwhile, over the past ten years Dr. Daniel Fernandez says coastal fog in Chile has been in decline, with a more pronounced drop than what has been observed in California, but the long-term trends aren’t clear. It might be connected to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or a regional effect. Presuming the fog stays with us, our understanding of how best to utilize it as a natural resource will continue to expand, thanks to the many thoughtful people who keep their heads in the clouds.

Standard Fog Collector (1 m x 1 m, mounted 2 m above the ground),
Glen Deven Ranch, California.
Used by permission. Photo: Dan Fernandez

Many thanks to those who contributed to this research for this article: Dr. Daniel Fernandez (Cal State Monterey Bay), Bill Fox (Center for Art and Environment, Nevada Museum of Art), Dr. Robert Schemenauer (FogQuest), and Chris Fogliatti (FogQuest).  

Read More

FogQuest – The modern pioneer in fog collection for water supply in isolated communities in the developing world, an all-volunteer NGO where 90% of funds received from donors and foundations is spent directly on fog-water projects.

The CloudFisher by Aqualonis – A newer design of fog collector designed for high winds. It is more expensive at the outset but intended to be cheaper to maintain than the Raschel mesh fog collectors. Its comparative efficiency in producing water is still being tested. A study in 2014-2015 (Mount Boutmezguida, Morocco) showed the CloudFisher mesh to be more productive (see results table on p. 20-21).

Warka with photovoltaic illumination (2017).
Photo: Warka Water.

Warka Water – A project by designer Arturo Vittori (see the most recent updates on Facebook). This fog collector, still in the pilot stage, is cylindrical, designed to resemble a tree (the warka fig tree), and made at least in part using locally sourced natural materials (bamboo, hemp, and bio-plastic). It is being piloted in Italy, with the target destination of villages in the NE Ethiopian high plateau. The current model (3.7) includes photovoltaic illumination.

Device pulls water from dry air, powered only by the sun (April 2017) – Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and UC Berkeley have built a device that can “pull liters of water out of the air each day in conditions as low as 20 percent humidity.”

The California fog collection story in a 25-minute video by Al-Jazeera’s “TechKnow” (April 2017), featuring an interview with fog scientist Dr. Daniel Fernandez, California State University Monterey Bay.

Want to make your own fog collector?

ClimateTechWiki article on fog harvesting.

Bayside Fog Collectors will be the small-purchaser distributor for the company that produces Raschel mesh– Marienberg– starting in late 2017, along with other products for people who want to make their own or buy a custom-built backyard fog collector.

Get the 2017 FogQuest Fog Water Collection Manual ($35 Canadian).

Fog research resources

The International Fog and Dew Association – founded at the 7th International Conference on Fog, Fog Collection and Dew held in Poland in 2016. The next conference is expected to be in Taiwan in 2019 and in the U.S. in 2022.

Fog Research: Network and Sites – a new fog StoryMap designed to be a repository for photographs and data from an international network of fog researchers, managed by USGS fog scientist Dr. Alicia Torregrosa, currently featuring research projects in the U.S. (California), Namibia, and Chile. Dr. Torregrosa is also the convener of a weekly webinar series for fog researchers, hosted by the Coastal Fog Online Group, part of the Pacific Coastal Fog Project.

The Summen Project – a $1.75 million, three-year study underway on the U.S. West Coast to study the relationships between fog, climate change, redwoods, and human activities. Read about the project’s launch: Researchers Eye Foggy Link Between Redwoods, Climate Change (2016).

Story Maps: A Rising Star of Climate Change Communication (the re-post)

The following was published April 10, 2017, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which now appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.org. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.
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Climate change information can usually be summarized in three words: boring bad news. Journalists try to remedy this with sensationalism, such as with the infamous “Obituary: Great Barrier Reef (25 Million BC-2016)” (Oct 11, 2016, by R. Jacobsen).  This headline angered ocean scientists and climate change communication specialists alike because it was non-factual, and might make otherwise action-oriented people give up: if it’s too late, why bother?

On the other hand, those trying to communicate nuanced, balanced climate change information can skew to the dry side of things. A 1,552-page carefully balanced report on climate change like the 2013 IPCC AR5 science volume is not going to engage the public.

So, how do you find the sweet spot between the 60-point-font doomsday headline and the impenetrable thesis with a thousand citations?

Enter: the Story Map.

Image is a screengrab from the 2017 Story Map “Climate Migrants,” by the Esri Story Maps Team,
accessible at http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/2017/climate-migrants/index.html. 

Setting stories in a geospatial, multimedia context

Story Maps are a suite of applications created by the mapping software company Esri (founded as Environmental Systems Research Institute, purveyor of the ArcGIS map-creating software) that help people tell stories online using maps combined with multimedia elements. Story Maps differ from other online interactive maps by presenting a narrative, combining geographic information system (GIS) data with images, videos, and web links. For example, any feature on an online map can be linked to a pop-up window that describes the feature in greater detail. It engages users immediately, and then gives them the opportunity to self-navigate to deeper layers of information.

The father of Story Maps at Esri, Allen Carroll, came up with the idea during his 27-year tenure as National Geographic ‘s Chief Cartographer, calling them “geostories.” However, lacking the technical support he needed to develop the idea at NatGeo, he joined Esri in 2010 and began developing Story Maps. They began as a variety of templates designed by his team to support different kinds of narratives. In 2011 these templates became web applications available for free on the Esri website. The applications are fully customizable, and the best examples submitted to Esri are featured in the Story Maps Gallery. To create your own Story Map you only need a web connection, a free public ArcGIS account (though paid accounts have more capabilities), and your own content, or links to content. No special technical knowledge is needed to develop a Story Map. Although Story Maps are mostly visual, they can be made accessible for the visually impaired by including audio content, such as podcasts. Story Mapping is a highly flexible tool.

“The novelty of Story Mapping is the interactivity,” said Alexis Mychajliw, a Graduate Student Instructor at the Hadly Lab, Stanford University, where she and her colleague Melissa Kemp taught an undergraduate course on using Story Maps to communicate about global change in 2014 and 2015. “People can zoom in on the things they care about.” The two Story Maps created by the Stanford students describe climate change impacts using maps that link to local news articles (See: Geographic Impacts of Global Change: Mapping the Stories of Californians, 2014, and Mapping the Impacts of Global Change: Stories of Our Changing Environment as Told By U.S. Citizens, 2015). While some

Story Maps firmly direct the user’s experience to a particular conclusion, the Stanford maps let the climate-related news articles linked to points on maps displaying GIS data about climate change projections speak for themselves. The user is left to connect the dots, perhaps making a stronger impression than either an alarmist headline or dense scientific report.

Story Maps are currently enjoying growing popularity. They are in use at the grade-school level (Mr. Carroll says they are used from 4^th grade up), and the tool is being taught widely in U.S. higher education institutions. Story Maps are replacing PowerPoint presentations at conferences. Non-governmental organizations are using them in lieu of traditional annual reports and project summaries for funders. Local governments and federal U.S. agencies like EPA, USGS, and NOAA are bringing Story Maps into play (see the NOAA Climate Program’s Story Map Evolution of the 2010-2015 Texas Drought).

Conservation science organizations are exploring the tool. There are eight Story Maps in the Landscape Conservation Cooperative Network’s collection, all published in 2016, including five about climate change (for example, one on the President's Resilient Lands and Waters Initiative in Hawai'i).

Image is a screengrab from the 2017 Story Map “Climate Migrants,” by the Esri Story Maps Team, accessible at http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/2017/climate-migrants/index.html. 

A tool that still needs testing and development

Story Maps have yet to be subjected to impact evaluation as a science communication tool. Generally, Story Maps are found to be “sticky”—they hold internet user’s attention longer than other websites—but there is a hunger at Esri for better analytics. Mr. Carroll reports that while there is anecdotal evidence of the tool’s effectiveness, much depends on the quality of the Story Map. He notes that not everyone is natural storyteller, and the impulse to overcomplicate a story is widespread. There is currently a trend of Story Maps being built inside of Story Maps that Mr. Carroll regards with skepticism.

Besides the problem with quality control in Story Mapping, there is the problem that it is hard to tell the publication date of any given Story Map in the current iterations of Esri’s templates. This is a useful tidbit of information, since much of the quality of a Story Map is contingent on its web links being active. Hopefully in the future Story Map application developers can give Story Mappers easy ways to display the date of their creations.

Story Maps have great potential as conduits for crowdsourcing climate change-related information in a geospatially explicit way. A National Park Memories Story Map from 2016 gives users an avenue for submitting personal stories and photos tied to specific parks.  This type of Story Mapping could have any number of applications for climate change researchers, such as crowdsourcing evidence of the distribution of invasive or endangered species.

Another place Story Maps might play an important role is in connecting local and historical place-based knowledge with climate model outputs. It strikes this correspondent that Story Maps could be particularly useful in linking climate data with Traditional Ecological Knowledge(s), such as Native/First Nations communities’ oral histories and cultural objects, to tell the story of climate change on indigenous lands.

Altogether Story Mapping is an exciting new tool in the climate change communication toolbox. Its multilayered interactive approach has great potential for inviting new audiences to take up otherwise boring bad news in better, self-paced ways, hopefully avoiding the pitfalls of doomsday overwhelm and over-nuanced pedantry, and moving people from curiosity to action.

Images above are screengrabs from the 2017 Story Map “Climate Migrants,” by the Esri Story Maps Team, accessible at http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/2017/climate-migrants/index.html

Resources on teaching Story Mapping

• “How to Tell Your Story Using Esri’s Story Map Apps” (72 min, Aug. 2016): a good webinar giving an introduction to Story Maps by Esri’s Allen Carroll and Bernie Szukalski.

• Two pedagogical articles came out of the global change Story Mapping classes at Stanford:

•  Mychajliw, AM, Kemp, ME, Truebe, ST, and Hadly, EA (2016). A geographic approach to teaching and communicating global change in California. STEM and GIS in Higher Education (Ed. Cowen, DJ), ESRI Press. (See Chapter 8, 155-169 in the 309-page e-book.)


•  Mychajliw, AM, Kemp, ME, & Hadly, EA (2015). Using the Anthropocene as a teaching, communication, and community engagement opportunity. The Anthropocene Review, 2:267-278.


• Kerski, J. (2013). Understanding our changing world through web-mapping based investigations. Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography, 2:11-26. Pages 24-25 include a clear, concise description of how Story Maps can be used in a geography classroom context.

Story Maps to explore

Climate Migrants (Jan. 2017). Allen Carroll recommends this recent Esri effort as an excellent example of climate change communication using Story Maps.

Atlas for a Changing Planet (2015). This is an Esri Story Maps Team product created for COP21, covering climate change in five thematic areas: understanding natural systems, mapping human systems, mapping ocean impacts, predicting the future, and international cooperation.

An interesting Story Map in progress: GRID-Arendal, a Norwegian environmental knowledge foundation working with the United Nations Environment Programme, is working on an Indigenous Peoples Story Map project:

Introduction to the project

Videos to be integrated into the project

Endangered Reefs, Threatened People (2016): an award-winning GRID-Arendal Story Map about coral reefs, climate change, and ocean acidification.

Forest Management, Gender and Climate Change: A Story Map from the Mexican Forest States (2016): created by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a UN agency, this Story Map utilizes photos and videos to quickly and effectively introduce IFAD’s forest management projects and the indigenous women involved in those projects.

Sea Level Rise Seen with New Eyes: the OWLs of San Mateo (the re-post)

The following was published August 30, 2016, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which now appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.org. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.
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On Aug. 4, 2016, the climate change communication NGO Climate Access launched a new project in San Mateo, California, on the San Francisco Bay, called Look Ahead - San Mateo. The project involves an installation in a popular bayside park, Coyote Point, to help people visualize future sea levels and approaches for adapting the shoreline.

Bay Area county map. © CC

The project uses a new technology called an OWL® that was piloted by Climate Access for sea level rise education last year in Mill Valley, Marin County, California (read a 4-page brief about that project). The OWL® was created by Owlized, a San Leandro-based tech start-up. The OWL, as described by its creator, is “a public, outdoor virtual reality viewer that shows users the future or history of a place.” An aside for grammar nerds: the word OWL is capitalized not because it is an acronym, but because using all-caps is “the easiest way to differentiate the (mouthful of) digital public information kiosk from our feathered friends,” as clarified by Nate Kauffman at Owlized.

An OWL looks like the coin-operated viewfinder you sometimes find on scenic shorelines, but operate by the push of a button on the side of the viewer and cost the visitor nothing. 

A girl and her family use the OWL viewer.
Photo: Sara S. Moore.

Public installations of OWLs include one at adult height and one at child or wheelchair-user height, in compliance with accessibility laws. Besides showing a 360-degree view of the landscape around the installation site under different scenarios of sea level rise and adaptation, it can collect input from visitors through a simple digital interface guided by an audio script. In Marin over 3,700 visitors gave input on different approaches to shoreline adaptation through the OWLs between June and September 2015. The Look Ahead - San Mateo organizers aim to boost participation by hosting weekend events with local community-based organizations at the OWL site over the five-month duration of the installation.

San Mateo is a place where residents should be looking ahead at sea level rise. According to a 2012 study by the Pacific Institute, of all California counties San Mateo is most vulnerable to sea level rise. That assertion is predicated on the presumption of 1.0 to 1.4 meters (3 ¼ to 4 ½ feet) of sea level rise along the California coast by the year 2100. It’s worth noting that those numbers might be understating the urgency of the situation. That Pacific Institute study was part of California’s Third Climate Assessment, which was delayed in its publication (something known to the author because of her own contribution to the Third Climate Assessment), so the climate scenarios for the report were actually run in 2009. Additionally, a footnote on those 2009 projections cautions that “most climate models fail to include ice‐melt contributions from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and as a result, the potential increase in mean sea level may be much higher” (p. 1). 

Aerial view of the port of Redwood City in
San Mateo County, California, USA. © CC

Now, refinements in sea level rise projections indicate that sea level is rising faster than previously thought (see the Aug. 10, 2016, Washington Post article “Seas aren’t just rising, scientists say — it’s worse than that. They’re speeding up.”). Meanwhile, the launch press release for Look Ahead - San Mateo cites a U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) projection of 3 feet of rise by 2100: a number more conservative than the Pacific Institute’s low-end projection from seven years ago. Across the SF Bay from the OWLs, three runways at Oakland International Airport are already closed for some high tides (Janin & Mandia [2012], Rising Sea Levels: An Introduction to Cause and Impact). San Francisco International, within sight of the OWLs, is sketching out plans for floating runways, seawalls, and levees.

While communicating about sea level rise to San-Mateans is an urgent matter, using innovative technology to communicate about climate change has its trade-offs. While the OWLs do attract visitors—there was a steady stream of passersby lining up at the OWLs on the launch day—the OWLs are costly and breakable. On the launch day one of the two OWLs was not turned on (electrical connection issues), and a week after the launch both OWLs had to be removed for maintenance, returning a few days later.

The OWL installations are being backed by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Region IX office through education funds made available after the recent release of updated flood maps. The Marin installation was funded with a 150,000 USD FEMA grant that ran the OWLs from May 2015 to September 2015 (only collecting useable survey data for four of those months). The current installation is supported with a 200,000 USD grant, which will run the OWLs from August 2016 to December 2016. Unfortunately, neither Marin nor San Mateo could afford to purchase and maintain the OWLs on a permanent basis.

There is also the practical problem of installing the OWLs in flood-prone areas. The installation in Marin was on the bayside coast near a hiking/biking trail that is already known to go underwater during some King Tides, putting the electrically powered OWLs at risk of damage: this new installation is on higher ground. Also, reducing the greenhouse gas footprint of the project, the San Mateo OWLs are solar-powered. Another lesson from the Marin pilot was that some people didn’t visit the OWLs because they appeared to cost money (resembling coin-operated viewfinders): a sentence about the viewers being free of cost was added to the signage at the San Mateo coast.

In January the OWLs will be removed and re-installed in San Francisco for a third iteration of the experiment.

Full disclosure: the author is volunteering for the Look Ahead - San Mateo County project doing local social media support. The opinions expressed here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the partners or funders of the project (Climate Access, San Mateo County, Owlized, Dr. Susanne Moser, Antioch University, Nutter Consulting, the California Coastal Conservancy, or FEMA Region IX).

Learn more about the OWL installations and other sea level rise adaptation work ongoing in San Mateo and Marin counties:

• Watch the coverage by a local TV station (KPIX - CBS) of the Look Ahead - San Mateo launch,  August 4, 2016 (1m 48s)


• Read the Project and Research Summary for the OWL installation in Marin: Moser, S.C., Daniels, C., Pike, C. and Huva, A. (2016). Here-Now-Us: Visualizing Sea Level Rise and Adaptation Using the OWL Technology in Marin County, California. Susanne Moser Research and Consulting, Santa Cruz and Climate Access, San Francisco. (69 pages, accessed Aug. 14, 2016).


•  Keep an eye out for San Mateo’s Sea Level Rise Vulnerability Assessment, expected to be released in September 2016 after a draft review meeting with stakeholders.


• Check out Sea Change San Mateo County for info on workshops planned for this October using the “Game of Floods” (a free open-source resource). Read more about the game and the planning award it won (Mill Valley Patch, July 20, 2016).


• You can follow Look Ahead - SMC on Twitter and Facebook.

The Internet of Water (the re-post)

The following was published Oct. 31, 2016, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which appears to have gone defunct. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.
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The installation of a sensor at Ellsworth Pond.

 © 2016 Real Time Water Systems Lab

At the recent Great Lakes Adaptation Forum held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Oct. 5-7, 2016, I heard about an exciting new approach to managing stormwater runoff using remote sensing technology, called the “internet of water,” or “intelligent stormwater grids.” The presentation was about how data-gathering gadgets were installed this past summer around the catchment area of a pond in Ann Arbor by members of the University of Michigan’s Real Time Water Systems Lab, led by engineer Branko Kerkez. I believe I was the only current California resident in the room, so I might have been alone in having a lightbulb go on over my head as I listened to the description of the installations, anticipating Kerkez bringing up the possible applications of this technology for capturing the Los Angeles River runoff that infamously goes straight into the ocean. That water could, if captured and treated, provide the city with all the water it needs, relieving demand on Northern California’s water resources, which depend largely on meltwater from the Sierra snowpack, which is expected to disappear with climate change. It turns out Kerkez previously helped develop real-time remote monitoring of Sierra snowmelt as part of a UC Berkeley research team. California’s drought appears to be one of the initial inspirations for his remote sensing experiments (read more about his earlier work in California here).

This short video from Aug. 5, 2016, describes how the internet of water as developed by Kerkez’s lab might help Los Angeles. With the real-time water management technology, “you can strategically hold back certain portions of [runoff] water and potentially even reuse it,” says Kerkez in the video. By making aging infrastructure responsive to an influx of stormwater you could not only harness the water for other uses but possibly avert a flood by moving water to a less inundated neighborhood.

Still from 2016 video "Building the Internet of Water."
Sensor installation.

Still from 2016 video "Building the Internet of Water."
Remote readout.

On Oct. 1, 2016, California officially entered its sixth year of drought. The Sacramento Bee reported on Sept. 30, that forecasters are predicting “it’s going to take a long time before anyone declares California’s drought over.” Southern California is looking like it will continue to be particularly dry.

Some LA River stormwater runoff is already being captured and used to recharge groundwater, but the LA Department of Water and Power is looking to step up those efforts significantly and introduce direct reuse of runoff with a Stormwater Capture Master Plan, now in its third year of development. Read a PowerPoint from the Plan’s final public hearing in June 2015 describing its scope and ambitions. What the internet of water offers will not revolutionize this project, but it could make the project much more effective.

The goal of the Ann Arbor pilot presently is to demonstrate real-time adaptive management for stormwater. The remote sensing instruments deliver to the internet measurements of the flow in open channels, soil moisture, rainfall, and water quality. Microcontrollers and wireless communication detect and transmit the information at a one-minute resolution. For the demonstration project, ten devices were deployed within a three-square-mile catchment called Ellsworth Pond, selected because the county allowed the team access to it. At this stage, the technology is relatively inexpensive, using data analysis algorithms and hardware platforms custom-made in Kerkez’s lab.

Some of the barriers to using these devices for management that were discussed at the GLAF presentation are the challenges of identifying and reducing errors in the data, and vandalism of the instruments. So far the lab has not had to deal with the latter problem, but it may arise as more instruments are installed in more densely populated areas. Also, a May 2016 article in Environmental Science and Technology (Kerkez et al.) states that the research on how to create a smarter stormwater system is not limited by technology, but “rather by a much more fundamental need to understand the complex spatiotemporal dynamics that govern water flow and quality across large urban areas.”

Before moving on to helping solve Los Angeles’ stormwater runoff problems, these water management gadgets will be piloted further in Ann Arbor, Toledo, Milwaukee, and Fort Worth-Dallas, using real-time data from the water system to paint a better picture of how stormwater behaves and how we might use it more wisely.

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Learn more about the smarter stormwater management pilot projects by the University of Michigan’s Real Time Water Systems Lab: 

• Open Storm, the Real Time Water Systems Lab's "smart" water system project web site:  http://open-storm.org/
• Kerkez’s bibliography of articles on “smart” water systems: http://open-storm.org/read/
• Check out the lab’s DIY instructions for “simple-to-assemble controllers” you can attach to ponds, rain barrels, green roofs & etc. to control the flow of stormwater before and during storms: http://open-storm.org/procedure/control/

The Sea Level Rise Solution that is as Charismatic as Mud (the re-post)

The following  was published Feb. 17, 2017, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which appears to have gone defunct. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.

Photo by Agnali. CC0/Pixabay License.

This past fall, when soon-to-be President Trump used “drain the swamp”  as an anti-corruption rallying cry, some biologists and wetlands advocates pointed out that swamps are actually quite useful. Also called wetlands, swamps can be a critical part of natural infrastructure for the purposes of protecting the shoreline from storm surge and sea level rise, in addition to providing habitat and improving water quality.

Sediment, matter that settles to the bottom of a body of water, nourishes wetlands. Sediment, literally as charismatic as mud, is not given the same attention as a natural resource as fresh water or plant life. It is not photogenic. It is out of sight and out of mind. It is a waste product, an impediment to shipping traffic. But in areas where wetlands have been identified as strategically valuable in the defense against rising sea levels, sediment’s star is rising.

One of these areas is the San Francisco Bay, where sea level has been measured as rising steadily since its first tide gauge was installed in 1854. Numerous wetlands restoration projects are underway to help protect the bay shoreline, and sediment is in demand to nourish them. Right now, there is a shrinking supply of sediment in the SF Bay. According to Bodega Marine Laboratory oceanographer Doug George, the primary culprit is dams trapping sediment, but also the petering out of the large pulse of sediment that came with placer gold mining during the Gold Rush, and current sand mining practices. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (ACE), responsible for dredging to maintain channel depths for ship navigation at U.S. harbors, is dumping dredged materials from the bottom of the bay—useful but uncharismatic mud—outside the Golden Gate Bridge. ACE is bound by federal statute to do the least-cost disposal method, and it costs more to reuse sediment for wetlands.

A Lawsuit over Mud

Some of the dredged material is being redistributed to nourish bayside wetlands, but not enough. A 1998 environmental impact statement (see the Long Term Management Strategy [LTMS] for the Placement of Dredged Material in the San Francisco Bay Region) indicates that 40% of that dredged material should be put to “beneficial reuse,” including wetlands nourishment. However, in 2016 ACE allocated less than 40% of its dredged materials to reuse. According to the Bay Conservation and Development Commission  (BCDC) Executive Director, Larry Goldzband, and Sediment Program Manager, Brenda Goeden, other dredgers in the bay are keeping up with the 40% reuse policy, but ACE, the largest dredger, has been falling short.

BCDC, formed in 1965 in response to heavy shoreline development on the SF Bay, is the agency tasked with keeping the bay from shrinking in size. So, in theory, it would be all in on dredging. However, BCDC is concerned about the bay’s landward-shifting shoreline. It was one of the first government agencies in the U.S. to issue guidelines responding to sea level rise. Its staff report, Living with a Rising Bay (2011), informed SF Bay Plan revisions, including the assertion that “[a]n adequate supply of sediment is necessary to ensure resilience of the Bay ecosystem as sea level rise accelerates.”

ACE has worked closely with BCDC for years on the question of sediment management in the SF Bay.  ACE carries out its responsibility regarding navigation channels in compliance with the Coastal Zone Management Act which gives BCDC its accreditation. BCDC reviews ACE practices and determines whether they are consistent with that federal act. Now, BCDC, chafing under the shortfall in beneficially reused sediment, on Sept. 22, 2016, filed a lawsuit against ACE to force it to stop dumping good mud. While ACE falls back on the federal requirement of using a least cost disposal method as a rationale for its shortfall, the lawsuit focuses on the full language of the regulation, which dictates that the disposal method be “environmentally acceptable” (per L. Goldzband). The lawsuit was filed after months of discussions and attempts at mediation. In late March 2017 representatives of ACE and BCDC will attend an “Alternative Dispute Resolution,” a last-ditch attempt to avoid the courts.

A SF Bay Wetlands Restoration Project Roll Call

There are many pilot projects involving sediment in various stages of development in the SF Bay.

Bel Marin Keys/ Hamilton Airfield

This ACE/ California Coastal Conservancy project is celebrated as a successful transformation of a military site into a wetland. Click here to see a 1:38 video with images of the breaching of the levee, opening the land to the SF Bay waters in 2014. This project benefited from beneficially reused sediment.

Oro Loma Horizontal Levee Project

This, the first horizontal levee in the SF Bay, using vegetation on a slope to slow waves rather than a vertical wall, was set to be fully operational in 2016. It might be the first levee of its kind in the world. After more than four years in the permitting process it took six months to build (per Nate Kauffman in Save the Bay, 2016).

Cullinan Ranch

This project in the North Bay, now near completion in the Napa River Delta, came out of a movement to block fill and residential development on the former wetlands. Read about its return to recreational use in “Into the Breach: Paddlers and Ducks Return to Cullinan Ranch” (2016).

South Bay Salt Ponds

This is “the largest tidal wetland restoration project on the West Coast.” It is fully underway, and will convert 15,100 acres of commercial salt ponds at the south end of SF Bay into mud flats and tidal marsh. It will rely mostly on natural sedimentation processes rather than reused dredged material.

Montezuma Wetlands Restoration Project (Suisun Marsh)

Now completed, this is an interesting project because it used “slightly more chemically challenged” dredged material than what is usually used in restoration projects: it is designed to safely make beneficial reuse of material that otherwise would be dumped in the open ocean. Scroll to the bottom of this page for a brief description of this project by the SF Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. A 3-page description of the project written during its initial stages.

Living Shorelines

This subtidal restoration demonstration project in San Rafael and Hayward was begun in 2012, is ongoing and now expanding to a new location in Richmond, California. It focuses on eelgrass and oyster habitat restoration.

Bothin Marsh

This project is intended to enhance Bothin Marsh for habitat and sea level rise protection through beneficial reuse of dredge sediment from Coyote Creek. Although Marin County has received a grant to develop a feasibility assessment, it remains in the conceptual design stage.

Sediment self-distribution in the South Bay?

A 2014 study (Bever et al.) showed through modeling that dredged material dumped south of the southern-most bridge across the SF Bay (Dumbarton) could result in the nourishment of “mudflats, marshes and breached salt ponds through natural sediment redistribution.” Any actual experiments with this kind of dumping would have to wait for BCDC to change its bay fill policy.

What’s Next for the SF Bay?

There’s no time to lose

While BCDC and ACE are locked in a legal battle, the Pacific climate cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has shifted as of the beginning of 2014 according to NOAA Fisheries: the switch brings a wind pattern that warms surface waters, causing seas near the West Coast to expand and rise according to NASA (2015). It may bring a rapid increase in sea level rise, and one NASA climate scientist, Josh Willis, says “we could be in for wild ride over the next 20 years or so.”  

Funding is on the horizon

In 2016 the SF Bay Area passed Measure AA, providing the first funding for the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority. While a good first step to sustained sea level rise preparation, the funding falls far short of the need. There is some hope (according to L. Goldzband of BCDC) that Measure AA funds could be augmented by the 2016 Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act (WIIN Act), which includes the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), providing funding for 10 pilot projects to maximize beneficial reuse of sediment. These projects would not be subject to the “least cost” regulation that currently poses a barrier to beneficial reuse. ACE should announce the locations of these projects by mid-March 2017.

Sedi-Match!

In 2013 BCDC facilitated “speed dating” sessions between dredgers and restoration project managers to see where dredged material could be beneficially reused. This turned into the development of a simple online tool called Sedi-Match. It was scheduled for release in January 2017. Read more about its development.

Rethinking fill policy

BCDC is about to launch a series of public meetings to discuss whether the agency should change its bay fill policy to prepare for sea level rise. If you are local to the SF Bay, you can attend these meetings beginning on April 20, 2017, from 1-4 PM at 375 Beale St., San Francisco.

Resilient by Design

This competition—aimed at “design[ing] solutions that protect the bayshore and mak[ing] us more resilient”—received a $4.6 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation on January 31, 2017, and should be ready to roll in April 2017. It is modeled after the “Rebuild by Design” Hurricane Sandy Design Competition.

More reading

See the full text of the Sept. 22, 2016, lawsuit filed by California Attorney General Kamala Harris on behalf of BCDC against Army Corps of Engineers.

Rising Reality, Part 4: The Shorelines (“Battle on Many Fronts”) – a November 2016 article by the SF Chronicle’s John King from a series on the SF Bay’s sea level rise problem.

Head in the Clouds: The Dream of Harvesting Water from Fog

My new blog post at WWF's ClimatePrep blog is live! Check it out:

Head in the Clouds: The Dream of Harvesting Water from Fog (June 2017)

The hardest part of this article was winnowing down the examples and lessons-learned for people who might want to start a fog water-collection project. I had so much fun exploring the history of fog water use and learning about new cutting-edge projects such as the fog water aquaponics project in Falda Verde, Chile (read more about the fog-water-->fish farm--> agriculture plan here - in Spanish) and of course the Hangar 1 "fodka" (fogwater vodka) being made practically in my back yard, in Alameda, California, to benefit fog collection research.

I hope I did justice to the many facets of fog collection research!

I took special pleasure in the coincidence that my last article for WWF was on Story Maps as a tool for climate change education and my first point of entry in my research for this article was a fog water collection research Story Map.

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Update: WWF's ClimatePrep blog apparently went defunct in 2018 and may not be revived.  I'm updating this blog's links to ClimatePrep to snapshots on Archive.org (where available). Some articles look OK there, some not so OK. For a readable version with images intact, see my ClimatePrep articles as reconstructed on this blog:

• Head in the Clouds: The Dream of Harvesting Water from Fog
June 08, 2017

• Story Maps: A Rising Star of Climate Change Communication
April 10, 2017

• The Sea Level Rise Solution that is as Charismatic as Mud
February 17, 2017

• The Internet of Water - October 31, 2016

• Sea Level Rise Seen with New Eyes: the OWLs of San Mateo
August 30, 2016

• California: The Rebeavering
May 22, 2015

• Government Folly in the Face of Climate Change
March 19, 2015

• In the Heat of the Moment
December 02, 2014

• California’s Adaptation Clarion Call
September 02, 2014

• Farmland in Flux
July 8, 2014

• Honest Conversations: Climate Change and Uncertainty
December 12, 2013