Studies on the characteristics of relative humidity annual cycle change include the frequency, phase, and amplitude of the time series and their changes. The effective diagnosis of the relative humidity annual cycle can provide important help in the monitoring and regulation of seasonal haze, the spatial distribution of epidemic outbreaks and their prevention and control, and the real-time forecasting and decision-making of monsoon precipitation. Different from studies on the trend of the relative humidity, the diagnosis in the annual cycle is scarce. This paper summarized the research status of relative humidity and its annual cycle, introduced several current methods for extracting common signals, and evaluated the feasibility of these methods for extracting annual cycle signals. Due to the time-varying characteristics of the annual cycle of relative humidity and complex structures such as asymmetric triangular waves, square-like waves, and state transients, harmonic-based extraction methods are difficult to succeed. The nonlinear signal extraction method with high noise immunity will solve this problem. At present, the relative humidity annual cycle studies urgently need to be improved and improve the quality of relative humidity observation data, accurately extract and quantify the time-varying characteristics and complex structure of the annual cycle. Moreover, combining the dynamic process and statistical analysis, we also need to study the physical mechanism of the change of relative humidity annual cycle (frequency, phase, amplitude, etc.) in China.