Korty, Robert

Research Interests

• Hurricanes
• moist convection
• large-scale dynamics
• climate dynamics
• climate variability
• past climates

Our group works on climate dynamics, which include applications to past, present, and future climate states. One of our current projects focuses on tropical cyclone activity across climate—from ice ages to very hot states. We study the thermodynamic properties and stability of the tropical atmosphere and how its evolution affects the suitability of the environment that spawns tropical storms. Part of this effort involves studying model-generated cyclones in different climates, both the statistical properties of the collection of vorticies in global models as well as higher resolution weather models applied to paleoclimates. Our primary goal is to use this information to better understand how storms fundamentally depend on properties of the underlying environment in which they live.

We are also currently performing some simulations of the early Cenozoic ocean circulation to compare with data derived from cores drilled from the bottom of the world's oceans. Geochemical analysis of these cores has yielded evidence that the source of deep water formation may have shifted during the Eocene epoch. We are working with Deborah Thomas in Oceanography to compare model simulations with the inferences drawn from these cores.