PNNL

Atmospheric scientist Dr. Jerome Fast was recently named a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Fellow, a top rank for PNNL researchers with sustained, high-quality work in science and engineering. Laboratory Fellows are appointed by PNNL’s Laboratory Director based upon recommendations of a review committee of Laboratory Fellows representing all research directorates.

Fast joined PNNL in 1994 and has spent his career studying atmospheric phenomena such as transport and aerosol dispersion, trace gas and particulate chemistry, and boundary layer meteorology. With his extensive expertise in atmospheric modeling and field campaign design and implementation, Fast has led research funded by the U.S. Departments of Energy, Agriculture, and Defense, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Fast is the principal investigator of a three-year project supported by DOE’s Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program—the Integrated Cloud, Land-Surface, and Aerosol System Study, or ICLASS. This science focus area project seeks to improve understanding and model representation of key processes associated with convective clouds, atmospheric particles, and the land surface. ICLASS consists of a core team of 25 PNNL scientists and collaboration with researchers nationwide.

Since 2009, Fast has been an affiliate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. He has been the forecaster of many field campaigns, including one in 2006 in which international researchers flocked to Mexico City to study how emissions from a megacity—a city with a population of 10 million or more—could influence local, regional, and global climate.

Most recently, he organized a field campaign around the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility’s Southern Great Plains atmospheric observatory in north-central Oklahoma during 2016 to better understand the relationships between shallow clouds, aerosols, and land ecosystems.

As of mid-2018, Fast had authored 129 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He has also contributed to book chapters, user’s guides, and tutorials related to the chemistry version of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) community model.

Fast is a member of the American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society, and Sigma Xi, an international honor society for scientists and engineers. He has served on several committees and working groups, including the ARM Aerosol Measurement Science Group, ARM-ASR Coordination Team, WRF Release Committee, and WRF model working group on atmospheric chemistry.