A well known paper that made major advances in large-scale water balance was written by Gene Rasmusson in 1967. It built on the work of others at M.I.T. under Victor Starr related to the atmospheric general circulation, and especially on a very valuable compilation of statistics by Abraham Oort and Rasmusson. The application of these statistics to the transport of water vapor and its divergence over North America to compute evaporation E minus precipitation P as a residual of the atmospheric moisture budget enabled reliable water budgets to be computed for the first time. This work has advanced with recent reanalyses, but some of the same problems encountered and dealt with by Gene still exist. An update of recent results for the global hydrological cycle will be provided.