Citation read to Rol Madden on 15 March 2001 at the presentation of the IMSC Achievement Award at 8IMSC.

Roland Madden has been involved in the atmospheric sciences since the late 1960s. He has been a Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Sciences in Boulder for most of his career and he is presently the Deputy Head of the Climate Analysis Section. He is also deeply engaged in the Geophysical Statistics Project at NCAR, where he brings physical competence and insights into the interdisciplinary setting of the project.

Roland Madden has always been interested in statistical analysis, and has used statistical techniques successfully and creatively. His exciting detection of a large-scale low-frequency propagating wave-like feature in the tropical troposphere is his best known achievement. The detection was facilitated by a careful statistical analysis of observational data. In fact, this feature is commonly known as the Madden-and-Julian Oscillation (MJO; 1972). Another major achievement is the development of the concept of "potential predictability" (1976), which is an innovative time domain analysis of variance that is used to assess atmospheric predictability.

Roland Madden also made important contributions in the area of climate change detection (1980), sampling strategies (1993), atmospheric angular momentum balance (1995) and the estimation of frequency spectra of meteorological data (1997).

Roland Madden is an excellent scientist. He provides an outstanding example of a scientist who has applied statistical reasoning and methods in the atmospheric sciences in a responsible and effective manner. He has demonstrated that many statistical concepts, developed in mathematical statistics, are useful tools within atmospheric sciences. On the other hand, he did not simply rely on methods developed by other disciplines. Instead, atmospheric sciences has its particularities that need particular methods and concepts, and Roland Madden was one of the few atmospheric scientists who developed such methods and concepts in a methodologically sound manner.