John Elmer Kutzbach was Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
He was an aviation weather forecaster in the United States Air Force, stationed in France (1961–1963).
He has held one-year visiting appointments at the Meteorological Office of the United Kingdom, Bracknell, England (1968) and the Univ.
He collaborated with an international group of paleoecologists, glaciologists, geomorphologists, and marine geologists in using field observations of past climate and environments in evaluating simulations of global climate from the last glacial maximum, 21000 years ago, to the present (1985, 1988, 1993a).
Kutzbach’s interdisciplinary collaboration continued in studies of earlier geologic eras using climate models to investigate the effects of large changes in Earth’s orography (1989a, 2001), the altered land/ocean configuration of Pangea (1989b, 1993b), and long-period changes of orbital parameters (2014).