CSUMB fog researcher part of $733,000 grant for climate study

By Mark C. Anderson

A fog descends. A fog lifts. A fog haunts. A fog enraptures. 

A fog insulates, isolates, rolls in and burns off.

Fog does a lot of things. It even, on occasion, settles. But it rarely sits still for long.

Daniel Fernandez, a professor of applied environmental science at Cal State Monterey Bay, knows this well. He’s made it his career to measure its moisture, imagine its movements, gauge its speed, evaluate its content, understand its preferences and — most famously — explore its possibilities as a source of water. And a new $733,000 grant from the Heising-Simons Foundation will establish the Pacific Coastal Fog Research project and allow him to learn even more as a member of a collaborative team.

Fernandez will continue to capture moisture with nets he’s built around campus, while empowering civilians to do the same with kits at home.

“Not all fog is created alike,” he says. “It’s a very dynamic phenomenon.”

Fernandez teaches classes in first-year physics, sustainability systems, and infrastructure systems, and manages the CSUMB Sustainable City Year Program, while conducting evolving fog research.

He will be one of five researchers — known, at least among themselves, as the Fog Five – studying the capture, measurement and physical characterization of fog. 

The goal of the endeavor sounds simple, but given fog’s on-brand obfuscation, will be challenging to reach: Determine how fog will be affected by climate change along the California coast. 

“How is it changing, and how is that happening in ways that aren’t going to be uniform?” he says, noting everything from elevation, latitude, microclimate, sun exposure and proximity to the coast all play potent roles in the presence and qualities of fog. “The results of this should provide data with which we can start to make sense of patterns.”

Fernandez’s task will be to monitor 15 fog catchments across the entire state, from Eureka to San Diego, with two possible measurement sites in Mexico.

His dream outcome for the study: A topographic-type map that shows fog zones, patterns and their various qualities, which the grant maker would share, open-source style.

In other words, per Fernandez, “Where and when is it foggy?

“It’s the biggest study of its kind [to date],” he says.

He’ll be joined by four similarly distinguished fog experts within a well-acquainted scientific-academic niche, contributing to the findings from complementary perspectives. 

Those include Rachel Clemesha of Scripps Institute of Oceanography, Sara Baguskas at San Francisco State, and Indiana University’s Travis O'Brien.

Peter Weiss is also among the Fog Five. He serves as a faculty researcher and lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, and — for the purposes of this collaboration — describes himself as “the chemistry guy,” collecting fog water to see what’s in it. 

“The main question we get over and over: ‘Is fog disappearing?’” Weiss says. “We can’t really answer that now. We don’t have the data or the observations. It’s too nuanced — and very ephemeral.”

Both Weiss and Fernandez note this data push represents a big opportunity to fill that vacuum of understanding, but is also only a beginning. 

“This can be a very helpful snapshot,” Fernandez says, “but we need to keep learning.”

In other words, gathering more about a planetary weather element — and a changing planet — proves key not so much because details are foggy, but because there are not enough of them. 

“Fog incites a passion, a fear, usually something extreme,” he says. “Some find it depressing. Some love it. Either way, it provokes emotion. It has its own beauty, its own mystique.”

And a lot more for the Fog Five to learn about it.