Robert Korty

My main research interests are in large-scale climate dynamics, which motivate projects designed to comprehend past, present, and future climate states; particularly in paleoclimates such as the late Cretaceous period and the early Eocene epoch when the planet was ice-free, exotic plants and animals lived above the Arctic Circle, and the planet's meridional temperature gradient was small compared to the present climate. Understanding how the atmosphere and oceans transported sufficient heat from the Tropics to higher latitudes in the presence of a weak temperature gradient has been a vexing problem, confounding contemporary numerical models and general circulation theory alike. During these times, deep convection may have been more important to the maintenance of the tropospheric stratification at middle and high latitudes than it is presently, and the relative contribution of baroclinic eddies and convection to the stratification likely varies with climate state. Numerical climate simulations, observational analyses (of the present atmosphere), and conceptual models are used to tackle these questions. hurricane-ocean interactions, which may play some role in larger-scale problems, but are fascinating in their own right. Tropical cyclones deposit momentum into the surface mixed-layer of the ocean beneath them, which leads to an isolated but vigorous bout of mixing with cold thermocline waters through a shear-instability. This mixing lowers the temperature of the upper ocean (routine evidence can be seen in satellite images of the sea surface temperatures in the wake of a hurricane) and simultaneously mixes heat down the water column. The recovery of this wake is a complex problem of differing time-scales: surface heating restores the sea surface temperature after about a week, but the evolution of interior density anomalies is poorly understood.