Frank Wentz is the CEO and director of Remote Sensing Systems, a company he founded in 1974, which specializes in satellite microwave remote sensing research. Together with Carl Mears, he is best known for developing a satellite temperature record from MSU and AMSU. Intercomparison of this record with the earlier UAH satellite temperature record, developed by John Christy and Roy Spencer, revealed deficiencies in the earlier work; specifically, the warming trend in the RSS version is larger than the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) one. From 1978 to 1982, Wentz was a member of NASA's SeaSat Experiment Team involved in the development of physically based retrieval methods for microwave scatterometers and radiometers. He has also investigated the effect of climate change on satellite-derived evaporation, precipitation and surface wind values. His findings are different from most climate change model predictions.
Education
B.S. (1969) and M.S. (1971) in physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Service
Member of various NASA Science Teams
National Research Council's Earth Studies Board
National Research Council's Panel on Reconciling Temperature Observations
A lead author for CCSP Synthesis and Assessment Product on Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere
Awards
2011: American Geophysical Union Fellow
2013: IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society Transactions Prize Paper for the paper "The emissivity of the ocean surface between 6 - 90 GHz over a large range of wind speeds and Earth incidence angles" (secondary author) 2015: American Meteorological Society Fellow 2015: Recipient of the AMS Verner E Suomi Award for "pioneering, painstaking work to accurately retrieve geophysical parameters from satellite microwave instruments and using these measurements to elucidate climate trends"