We are very pleased to have ongoing support from The Cloud Appreciation Society in Britain, which will be spread out over the 12 months of 2018. This large and active organization is donating a portion of their membership fees to support the work of FogQuest.
It is led by Gavin Pretor-Pinney and can be reached at the link below.
https://cloudappreciationsociety.org
We keep in regular contact with the people in the village of Tojquia, in the Western Highlands of Guatemala, where we have worked since 2006. The 35 large fog collectors, each with an area of 40 square meters, have provided a valuable water resource in the dry season for the villagers. Last year we identified five homes for the next stage of the project and installed new water tanks at the homes.
This year we will build five new Large Fog Collectors for these homes. The work will take place in September with the construction guided by Nicolas Zanetta from Chile, with the actual work being done by the people of the village. Two other FogQuest volunteers from Canada will participate and help with a variety of additional tasks. We hope to have a daily blog from the site during the two-week period in the field. If you can help support this project, we would greatly appreciate your donations.
The Nepal Agricultural Cooperative Central Federation Ltd. (NACCFL) is currently working in collaboration with the Chainpur Small Farmers Agricultural Cooperative Ltd. (SFACL) to find new sources of drinking water supplies for residents of the Chainpur Village Municipality in Dhading District. The community has traditionally relied on small springs emerging at the foothill of the upland forested areas but these went dry, however, after the April of 2015 earthquake, probably due to the fault lines that were created and which tunneled the available water supplies directly into the ground. The community had then to resort to bottle water supplies until they built an emergency supply line diverting water from a larger spring situated more than two kilometres away. In May of 2017, the community switched back to provisioning themselves from the local springs as these had recently started flowing back again. The flows have although been very variable and of low quality ever since.
NACCFL and the Chainpur SFACL recently launched a fog water collection study pilot project to assess the possibility of using fog water collection to expand the supplies in this water scarce community. Two Standard Fog Collectors (SFCs) of 1 m2 were installed to measure the fog collection potential in two strategically selected sites over a one-year period. The aim of this future project would be to build three or four Large Fog Collectors (LFCs) for a total surface area of up to 200 m2. So far, results from the SFCs indicate that collection rates of 5 to 6 litres a day would be easily reached for the four continuous months of the fog season there. At these rates, we would expect to increase the water supplies for the community by 120,000 to 144,000 litres a year. This project would target 50 households, thus improving water security for approximately 200 people.
FogQuest provided some initial project guidance, advice related to the construction and installation of the SFCs, as well as the Raschel mesh that was used in the fog collectors. We will also help to evaluate the SFC data that are being collected by Laurent-Charles Tremblay Levesque of CECI. Below are photographs of the two SFC installations, the geographic location, and the shop where the SFCs were constructed.
We ask your patience as FogQuest moves to a new content management system platform for our website. This work is being done by volunteers and is almost complete. Substantial updates of parts of the site will also be provided once the revision is operational. In the meantime, we hope you find the current features of the site helpful and informative.
A part of our mandate as a charity is to help people, organizations, institutions and corporations understand the importance of fog water in natural ecosystems and as a managed water resource. One way we do this is through speaking engagements but by far the most widespread and effective tool we have is to respond to requests for information that we receive from people visiting our website. Sometimes these requests can lead to quite unexpected results.
Well over a year ago FogQuest was approached by Hangar 1 with questions regarding whether fog might be collected in California and used, in part, to make a new vodka. After some discussion, we put them in contact with one of our volunteers in California, Chris Fogliatti, who used small fog collectors in San Francisco to produce water for Hangar 1. This ultimately resulted in the successful release of Hangar 1 Fog Point vodka in May 2016. It also bought a great deal of attention to the importance of fog as a water resource in California.
This spring Hangar 1, through their parent company Proximo Spirits, sent FogQuest a very generous donation in recognition of the information we had provided. We are very grateful for this donation and, in turn, will use these funds for our water projects in developing countries. Proximo Spirits also provided a substantial donation to support the fog research being done by Prof. Daniel Fernandez at the University of California in Monterey Bay.
After several years of development the revised and updated 2017 FogQuest Fogwater Collection Manual will be available soon as an e-book, printed book or PDF.
This comprehensive guide will prepare any individual, group, or NGO for fog collection projects in the field. Based on many years of research and experience, the manual discusses and details the scientific, climatic and social conditions needed to complete successful fog collection projects internationally.
We will send out a notice when the guide is available for purchase. Stay tuned!
This project has been ongoing successfully since 2006. There are 35 large fog collectors (LFCs) that FogQuest and the villagers of Tojquia have built in the high mountains of Western Guatemala. Each of the LFCs has a surface area of 40 square meters and produces an average of about 200 L of water a day during the winter dry season.
In December 2016 Nicolas Zanetta, a FogQuest volunteer from Chile, visited the site to assess the status of the fog collectors and to meet with the villagers and members of the village water committee. This committee was established a year ago to coordinate the use of the fog collectors and to collect a small fee from the users to use in the maintenance of the fog collectors. The family income in the community is only about one dollar US a day, so the collection of funds from the community is a significant commitment.
Nicolas found that all 35 collectors were in good condition with no major problems. Eight of the collectors needed minor maintenance to their troughs or the mesh. Funding from FogQuest donors was available to buy four new water tanks each of 1000 L capacity. The tanks were installed at four homes to collect rain water during the wet season. They will be moved to receive water from fog collectors when new ones are built for the families. It was the water committee that decided which families would receive the new tanks and this was based on the work they had contributed to the project in previous years; however, the entire community had to agree to the location of the tanks before they were installed.
A major change that Nicolas noted during his visit was the greater involvement of young people in the community in the fog collection project. This is the 12th year of the project and they are gradually taking over leadership and maintenance from their parents.
Before Nicolas left Tojquia, the community organized a celebration for what was achieved during the past year, the success of the water committee fund, the new beneficiaries, and a new visit from FogQuest to the community. As Nicolas says “It was a lunch where it was possible to share a pleasant afternoon with the whole community and one which provided an opportunity to strengthen trust and commitments.”
FogQuest is providing technical and material assistance to a team from Engineers Without Borders (student chapter, University of Colorado) who will set up four SFC’s in the Kalinchowk region on Nepal, an area that was badly damaged by the earthquakes of two years ago and is in need of water.
The Canadian NGO, Nepal Community Development Foundation is also assisting. A small team will depart from the U.S. this month and will spend two months in the region. We will post any updates and news we receive on our web site and in further editions of our newsletter.
FogQuest volunteer Nicolas Zanetta, recently returned from Nicaragua and Guatemala where he installed SFC’s in both countries. Here are some images from that trip – a full report will be posted here soon.
Below are a few news items that we’ve sent out on our newsletter and posted on our Facebook page over the past few months.
A very successful conference was held this summer in Poland, with about 125 delegates from about 30 countries attending. This is the seventh in a conference series that was started by Dr. Robert Schemenauer, the Executive Director of FogQuest, in 1998. The conference is not operated or sponsored by FogQuest but we endorse the efforts to enrich the knowledge base that can lead to successful uses of fog and dew as water supplies and to demonstrate to scientists working in the atmospheric sciences, as well as hydrology and related sciences, that there are important practical applications to their work.
Two papers were presented (see below) describing ongoing projects of FogQuest. One discussed the project in Tojquia, Guatemala from 2006 to 2016. The other discussed the fog collection projects in Nepal from 1997 to 2016. Dr. Robert Schemenauer attended the conference* as a representative of FogQuest and made a 15 minute presentation on the work in Nepal. Mr. Nicolas Zanetta from Chile represented both the Atacama Desert Center in Chile where he works and FogQuest where he is an important volunteer. Nicolas gave a one minute introduction to the work in Tojquia and interacted with the delegates at the associated poster paper.
The conference was a wonderful opportunity to exchange information and to meet colleagues from diverse backgrounds working in all parts of the world. It was also an opportunity to meet old friends. Pablo Osses went to Nepal almost 20 years ago to install the first small Standard Fog Collectors and to train local groups on the construction of Large Fog Collectors. He is now a Professor at the Catholic University of Chile in Santiago. Nicolas Zanetta is a young man who brings experience and great enthusiasm to our present project in Guatemala and this week will go to our new evaluation project in Nicaragua.
(*Dr. Schemenauer paid personally for his travel to Poland for the conference and Mr. Zanetta’s funds came from other sources. No donations to FogQuest were used for travel.)
The two conference papers presented on FogQuest work in Guatemala and in Nepal can be downloaded below. The entire conference proceedings volume is also available for download here.
FogQuest received a very generous donation from the Broadview Avenue Public School located in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The school put on a fundraising event earlier in the year. The theme was clouds, fog and raindrops. Our thanks to a teacher, Ms. Darlene Morrow, who initiated the event and all of the students who worked so hard to raise the funds. We will use the donation to help with our ongoing project in Tojquia, Guatemala.