A potential energy surface for the major isotopomer of water is constructed by fitting to observed vibration-rotation energy levels of the system using the exact kinetic energy operator nuclear motion program DVR3D. The starting point for the fit is the ab initio Born-Oppenheimer surface of Partridge and Schwenke [J. Chem. Phys. 106, 4618 (1997)] and corrections to it: both one- and two-electron relativistic effects, a correction to the height of the barrier to linearity, allowance for the Lamb shift and the inclusion of both adiabatic and nonadiabatic non-Born-Oppenheimer corrections. Fits are made by scaling the starting potential by a morphing function, the parameters of which are optimized. Two fitted potentials are presented which only differ significantly in their treatment of rotational nonadiabatic effects. Energy levels up to 25 468 cm(-1) with J=0, 2, and 5 are fitted with only 20 parameters. The resulting potentials predict experimentally known levels with Jless than or equal to10 with a standard deviation of 0.1 cm(-1), and are only slightly worse for J=20, for which rotational nonadiabatic effects are significant. The fits showed that around 100 known energy levels are probably the result of misassignments. Analysis of misassigned levels above 20 000 cm(-1) leads to the reassignment of 23 transitions. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.