Fog and Dew Harvesting: Italy and Chile in Comparison

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Maria Giovanna Di Bitonto
Adriana Angelotti
Alessandra Zanelli

Abstract

Climate change is the 21st century emergency, including the water issue in the first place, not only for developing countries, but also for Italy, as reported by the European Environment Agency (EEA, 2012).

According to this premise, the purpose of the report is to analyze fog and dew harvesting systems for dealing with drought, which are used in various oasis de niebla around the world, in particular in Chile, and verify whether they are also applicable in the Italian context.

The study areas correspond to Chañaral (Chile) and Milan (Italy): the two cities belong to completely different climatic regions, one extremely arid and the other continental moderate, but both are subjected to intense fogs especially in winter, although these phenomena have very different characteristics in the two continents.

While in Chile, investigations have been developed thanks to the existing experiments concerning fog; in Italy, having no researches to refer to, this study carried out the analyses of climate data related to dew. The meteorological data of air temperature, relative humidity and wind of the city of Milan will be taken in exam and processed, to verify, at least on a theoretical simplified level, whether and how much water is possible to condense and harvest from the air in Milan.

This investigation allows a first comparison of the efficiency of the phenomena in the two contexts, and possibly suggest a new innovative, economic and environmentally responsible way in which water resources are obtained in Po's Valley.

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