Paul Rowland Julian (born 1929), a Fellow of the
American Meteorological Society, is an American meteorologist who served as a longtime staff scientist at the
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), was co-author with Roland Madden of the study establishing the
Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO), and contributed to the international, multi-institutional Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP), Tropical Wind, Energy Conversion, and Reference Level Experiment (TWERLE), and Tropical Ocean-Global Atmosphere (TOGA) meteorology research programs. The MJO
meteorologic phenomenon he co-discovered is the largest element of the intraseasonal variability in the
tropical atmosphere, a traveling pattern arising from large-scale coupling between
atmospheric circulation and tropical
deep convection. Description of the MJO remains an important contribution to
climate research with relevance to modern short- and long-term weather and climate modeling.