Mehmet Levent Kurnaz

Mehmet Levent Kurnaz is a physicist specialized in climate science and a professor at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. He worked as a Mercator-IPC Fellow from September 2013 to end of August 2014. The title of his project was “Investigation of the Impacts of Climate Change to the Mediterranean Basin Using Regional Climate Modelling.”

In 1994, he graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a PhD degree in physics. After working at Tulane University as a post-doctoral researcher, he became a member of the Physics Department at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, in 1997. His research focuses on sand motion, regional climate modeling, and the impacts of climate change. Kurnaz’s engagement is based on the premise that climate research starts with global climate modeling where major research centers with immense computing power simulate the whole globe with low resolution. Other researchers then take the output of these simulations and increase the resolution to better model the characteristics of the climate of particular regions.

As an IPC-Mercator Fellow, Kurnaz investigated the impacts of climate change on the Mediterranean basin using this kind of regional climate modeling. As Turkey lies in one of the regions that will be affected severely by climate change, he plans various activities to increase climate awareness in Turkey, including public lectures, viral videos, blog posts, and newspaper articles.