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Language: en

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Hi, I’m Alicia Torregrosa.

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I work in the Menlo Park, California, office
of USGS Western Geographic Science Center

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and I’m a physical scientist.

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People ask me: “Why do you study coastal
fog?” and fog events have water and in very

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arid, parched places like California, water
is a big deal.

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If we can pull some of this water out of the
air in the summers, we could really make a

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difference for wildlife and other needs.

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We’re working with many partners to understand
efficiency of different materials such as

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this 3D, plastic mesh that helps collect the
fog droplets and another company that is coating

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this with a nanomaterial that makes it more
slippery and the fog droplets will drip faster

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and not evaporate.

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This is helping us understand how much water
there is in different fog events and also,

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what different kinds fog droplets are there.

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Fog research requires a lot of innovations.

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Fog droplets are so small that we need instruments
that can look at these very, very microphysical

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properties and it’s an area of huge innovation
because we’ve got huge amounts of data that

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require a lot of different statistical and
big data manipulations.

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And then there’s also the relationships
that we need to bring together ocean data,

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because of the sea sprays that create the
aerosols that the coastal fog droplets are

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going to aggregate around are interacting
with land, are interacting with biological

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entities — planktons, microbes, bacteria.

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There’s a lot of innovations, both in our
thinking, in the instruments that we need

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to use, and also in the partnerships that
we have to create in order to be able to understand

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the system that is making the fog.