Most weather stations measure everything at once — temperature, wind, pressure, rain. This one measures exactly one thing: how much water a passing fog bank actually deposits, drop by drop, on a mesh screen built for nothing else.
It was installed a decade ago as a side project, with no funding beyond a single research grant that expired years ago. Nobody has turned it off, because nobody else was collecting this particular number, and the record has quietly become the longest of its kind on the coast.
A record nobody meant to start
Fog is hard to measure precisely because it rarely falls the way rain does — it collects on surfaces, which makes the amount of water it delivers wildly dependent on what it's landing on. The mesh screen is a crude stand-in, but a consistent one.
Researchers now use the ten-year record to track subtle shifts in coastal fog frequency, a detail too small for most climate models but large enough, over a decade, to show a real trend the original project never set out to find.