Abstract:Precipitation characteristics, environment conditions, generation and development of the mesoscale convective system that brought about the extreme torrential rain in Beijing on 21 July 2012 were analyzed comprehensively in this paper by using various conventional and unconventional data. The results showed that the extreme torrential rain had the characteristics of long duration, great rainfall and wide coverage area and its process consisted of warm area precipitation and frontal precipitation. The warm area rainfall started earlier, the severe precipitation center was scattered and lasted long while the frontal rainfallprocess contained several severe rainfall centers with high precipitation efficiency, lasting a short time.Environment conditions of the mesoscale convective system that triggered this extreme severe rainfall were analyzed. The results showed that interactions of high level divergence, the wind shear and convergence with the vortex in the lower troposphere and the surface wind convergence line provided favorable environment to the severe extreme rain. The warm humid airs from the tropical and sub tropical zones converged over the torrential rain region, continuous and sufficient water vapor manifested as high atmospheric column of precipitable water and strong low level water vapor convergence and other extreme vapor conditions for the torrential rain. In addition, the intense precipitation was triggered by the vortex wind shear, wind disturbance on low level jet, surface wind convergence line and the effect of terrain under the condition of the plentiful water vapour and maintained. With the cold front moved eastward, heavy frontal rainfall was brought by the development and evolution of convective system made by the cold air and the suitable vertical wind shear.Generation and development processes of the mesoscale convective system were also studied. The findings suggested that stratiform cloud precipitation and dispersed convective precipitation occurred firstly in the precipitation process. The warm and steady stratiform cloud precipitation changed to be highly organized convectional precipitation as the cold dry air invaded. Many small scale and mesoscale convective clusters developed into mesoscale convective complex (MCC), leading to the extreme severe precipitation. Since all the directions of the echo long axis, terrain and echo movement were parallel, train effect was obviously seen in the radar echo imegery during this precipitation process. Meanwhile, the radar echo had the characteristics of backward propagation and low centroid which was similar to tropical heavy rainfalls. Finally, a series of scientific problems were proposed according to the integrated analysis on the observation data of this rare torrential rain event, such as the causes for the extreme torrential rain and the extreme rich water vapor, mechanisms for the warm area torrential rain in the north of China, the mechanism for the train effect and backward propagation, mechanisms for the organization and maintenance of the convective cells, the simulation and analysis ability of the numerical models to extreme torrential rains and so on.