The future of the global water cycle in general, and specifically the prediction of freshwater availability for humans around the world remain among the frontiers of climate research and are related to several UN Sustainable Development Goals. Especially the prediction of precipitation, which is the product of a complex integrated system, remain problematic. Improving precipitation predictions requires improved observations and modeling of all critical processes in the coupled earth system. The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) will launch the Global Precipitation EXperiment (GPEX) as a new Lighthouse Activity during the WCRP Open Science Conference in October 2023, to take on the challenge of improving precipitation predictions around the world. GPEX will be a cross-WCRP initiative centralized around the WCRP Years of Precipitation (YoP) and associated activities before and after. The YoP will include coordinated global field campaigns with an emphasis on different storm types for different seasons (atmospheric rivers in winter, springtime mesoscale convective systems, summer monsoons, and tropical cyclones in the fall), gridded data evaluation and analysis, km-scale modeling, process understanding, and prediction of extreme precipitation events as well as changes in precipitation seasonality. GPEX activities will take 5-10 years to complete through three (Pre-YoP, YoP, and Post-YoP) phases. Through this Townhall, we intend to inform the community of this exciting opportunity, seek community input on the Science Plan and its Implementation, and seek potential leaders to coordinate global field campaigns on different storm types, and/or to coordinate major precipitation related datasets, and modeling and prediction experiments.