James Murdoch Austin (May 25, 1915 – November 26, 2000) was a pioneering New Zealand-American meteorologist celebrated for modeling the meteorology of air pollution, particularly smokestack particulates. He earned his Sc.D. from MIT in 1941 and taught there as a professor until 1983, where he served as the doctoral advisor to Edward Norton Lorenz, the father of chaos theory. During World War II, his forecasting as a consultant to the US Army Air Force influenced critical operations like the bombardment of Cherbourg and the D-Day airborne landings, earning him the Medal of Freedom from President Harry S. Truman in 1946. He also made media history on June 9, 1948, by launching the first live television weather forecast in Boston on WBZ-TV. Beyond these achievements, he was MIT's first Summer Session director and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he remained married to fellow meteorologist Dr. Pauline Morrow Austin for 59 years until his death in Concord, Massachusetts at age 85.