Noel Cressie is a world leader in statistical methodology for analysing spatial and spatio-temporal data, and its applications to environmental science. His fundamental contributions changed the basic paradigm for analysing observations in space and space-time. Cressie has also contributed to research on pollution monitoring, climate prediction, ocean health, soil chemistry, and glacier movement, and is a NASA Science Team Member for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission. Responding to the huge volumes of complex data in environmental research, Cressie has made ground-breaking innovations for `big data analytics' for remote sensing and climate change.