SEASIDE — The future of coastal fog is anything but clear.
Daniel Fernandez, a Cal State Monterey Bay professor and electrical engineer-turned-fog researcher, recently launched the Pacific Coastal Fog Research project. Fernandez and a team of researchers around the U.S., the self-anointed “Fog Five,” were awarded a $733,000 grant from the Heising-Simons Foundation to study the impact of climate change on fog over the next five years through the project. The Fog Five hope to clear up the debated present and future state of the iconic scenery staple of California’s coast.
“It’s so ever-present in so many of our lives,” Fernandez says. “Whether we love it or hate it, it’s there.”
Fernandez will be monitoring the intake of fog at 15 collectors he has already placed along the California coast. Each is in a unique topographic site. His research will attempt to expand coverage of fog monitoring from Eureka to San Diego, so he can determine patterns in fog’s changing presence.
He performs his measurements in two ways.
First, Fernandez uses a “standard fog collector,” a device built by Canadian nonprofit, FogQuest. The device is composed of a double layer of mesh erected in a square meter frame, a few meters above ground. A trough is placed below the mesh. As more and more fog passes through the collector, water droplets coalesce around the mesh and eventually drip into the trough. Fernandez then measures the volume of water in the trough. This tells him the liquid water content in the air.
He then uses equipment that measures the number and size of water droplets in the air with precision. His instrument sucks in fog and uses a laser to assess the number of droplets and their size, based on their light content at a given second.
Finally, Fernandez compares the water content and the droplets’ size and density at a given time. This gives him a clearer picture of “how much” fog — a traditionally fickle thing to measure — is at a given time and place.
Todd Dawson, a plant ecologist and physiologist at the University of California, Berkeley who has authored pioneering research on fog and redwood trees, commends the new project. Dawson believes the Fog Research project’s innovation is manifold: its expanding of the fog study area, north and south, its standardization of collector equipment and its study of the variability of fog as a result of local topography.
“It’s going to improve our understanding about what really is happening to fog,” he says.
Dawson claims, however, that in some parts of the coast, “the fog definitely has been declining since the 1950s.”
In a landmark 2010 study assessing long-term fog frequency and its effect on the coastal redwood region ecosystem, he looked at visibility records from airports along the Central Coast, cloud measurements from the National Climate Data Center and coastal redwood tree rings. Coastal redwoods’ annual growth is dependent on water intake, up to 40% of which they get from fog. Their rings are a good snapshot of their growth, year to year.
He and his co-author found that in Arcata and Monterey, fog frequency, which they describe as daily averages converted from hourly records, has fallen 33% since the beginning of the 20th century. It has continued to decline, yet less substantially, since 1951, they found, despite a competing theory that fog was becoming more frequent on the Coast due to the increasing concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
One explanation for coastal fog’s apparent decline is the heating of ocean temperatures. Marine fog requires the intermixing of cold upwelling water and warm air temperatures above the land. As climate-induced marine heatwaves warm ocean temperatures, a critical ingredient in the sea fog recipe is lost.
Fernandez recognizes the local patterns but insists on nuance when discussing the overall supposed decline of fog in recent decades because there has not been a linear, straightforward change in fog density across the state. “There are shades of gray in there,” he says.
The Fog Research project will start to identify what changes in the spatial variation of fog tell us about its overall quantity — and whether it’s really in an overall slump or not.
In addition to clarifying the evolution of fog on the Central Coast, Dawson thinks the Fog Research project could be used to answer questions about the impact of fog on the area’s biodiversity. “Once we document what these patterns are, let’s figure out what they really mean ecologically . . . for ecosystems, people and everything.”
Fernandez also hopes to use the project’s findings to return to the question that originally got him interested in fog: Can we use its water for local ecosystems — and people — in need?
The investment in Fernandez’s research speaks to the importance of fog in the area. He emphasizes the daily impact it has on coastal Californians, from its interference in travel conditions — on the road, in the ocean and in the sky — as well its cooling effect on regional temperatures.
Fernandez also recognizes the gravity of the state of science research funding today.
“It’s very exciting. And at the same time, I think of all the people who lost their funding . . . I’m glad there are still venues and sources of support for this type of work, I just hope that there will be more.”