This issue begins our third year of publishing Prairie Fire. As we celebrate our second birthday, we would like to look back for a moment to our inaugural issue and remember why we are here and consider how far we have come. That a newspaper of any type can show growth and success in these challenging times is an accomplishment, and we have experienced both in our time so far. Many readers have joined us since our July 2007 issue, in which we published our position statement. Our philosophy and our purpose have not wavered, and we feel that publishing that statement again is helpful for us and for all the new readers, advertisers and contributors who have joined us along the way.

By Kevin E. Trenberth and Aiguo Dai

A key scientific question is how the global hydrological cycle changes over time, especially with global warming. A particular focus of our work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has been how precipitation changes as the climate changes and changes in extremes, including risk of flooding and drought. We have therefore put together the most comprehensive dataset on river discharge into the ocean for comparison with precipitation changes over each river basin as checks on both the precipitation and river flow data.