In 2004 a team of experts was invited by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to the Third International Workshop for Monsoons (IWM-III) to present reviews of the current research and forecast issues of monsoon weather. The reviews were the basis of the first edition of this book, which was published by WMO as Technical Document No. 1266 in 2005. This second book is a new effort based largely on the invited reviews presented at the IWM-IV in late 2008 with subsequent manuscripts revised and accepted in the 2009 to early 2010 timeframe. This book is organized in seven parts.
The first part provides an introduction to the title of the book, underscoring the concept that monsoon circulations in various parts of the globe can be viewed as components of an integrated global monsoon system. For most of the 20th century, the term "monsoon" was nearly synonymous to the Indian or South Asian monsoon. In the last several decades it became clear that the monsoon is a much larger and complex system that affects weather and climate over broader parts of tropical and subtropical Asia as well as other continents including Australia, Africa, South and North America, and the western North Pacific. Within Asia, the East Asian monsoon has distinct characteristics and dominates the weather and climate over a large longitudinal and latitudinal span from tropical Southeast Asia to midlatitude Northeast Asia. While the Asian monsoon with its South and East Asia components is considerably stronger and influences a far larger area and population than the monsoon in other parts of the world, all monsoon regions share the common feature of a
thermally driven, seasonal-reversing circulation with a well-defined period of abundant rainfall in the annual cycle.