WANG Pinxian

School of Ocean and Earth Sciences, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092 China

FIRST PARAGRAPH: Six monsoon systems are recognized in the modern world, the Asian, North and South African, Australian, North and South American, and their changes are affecting billions of people. The regional monsoon systems are driven by the same annual cycle of solar heating, yet differ from each other in their geographic position and orographic features. For over 300 years, the monsoon has been considered as a gigantic land-sea breeze of regional scale, but now it is considered as a global system over all continents but Antarctica.