Almost two-thirds of the world’s population is affected by the monsoon – the annual arrival of intense rains in areas north and south of the Equator. These drenching rains tend to arrive during each hemisphere’s summer.
The East Asian monsoon north of the equator is the best known and best studied, because it affects the largest land area and the most people. But the southern Indo-Australian monsoon is vitally important to northern Australia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. To date, it has been studied much less.
