Climate change is in the news frequently these days, and better-informed commentators note that changes in the water cycle pose the greatest challenge to society. We may be able to deal with an increase in temperature with a bit more air conditioning, but significant intensification in droughts and floods will be a more severe test. Civilization thrives at a range of temperatures at different latitudes, but it cannot cope without water. Thus, a number of national and international programs have been organized to assess and understand the “global water cycle.”

Schmitt, R.W. 2008. Salinity and the global water cycle. Oceanography 21(1):12–19, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2008.63.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.