The emergence of global‐scale hydrology

Emerging problems of environmental change and of long range hydrologic forecasting demand knowledge of the hydrologic cycle at global rather than catchment scale. Changes in atmosphere and/or landscape characteristics modify the earth's metabolism through changes in its biogeochemical cycles. The most basic of these is the water cycle which directly affects the global circulation of both atmosphere and ocean and hence is instrumental in shaping weather and climate. Defining the spatial extent of the environmental impact of a local land surface change, or identifying, for forecasting purposes, the location and nature of climatic anomalies that may be causally linked to local hydrologic persistencies requires global scale dynamic modeling of the coupled ocean‐atmosphere‐land surface. Development, evaluation, verification, and use of these models requires the active participation of hydrologists along with a wide range of other earth scientists. The current state of these models with respect to hydrology, their weaknesses, data needs, and potential utility are discussed.