My primary research ambition is to lead programs in socially relevant research that will have a positive impact on the way we take care of the environment so as to result in an improved quality of life both now and in the generations to come. I believe that the key to this is through improved earth system state and flux monitoring, prediction and reporting, in a way that is relevant to policy and decision making processes, flood and drought prediction and assessment, land and water management, national weather and climate forecasting, etc. My vision is that this goal will be realised through a combination of i) environmental sensing, ii) earth system modelling, and iii) optimal convergence of model predictions with observations through data assimilation. This is a new area of research that has gained wide spread interest over the past years.