Abstract:High resolution data of Himawari 8 (H8 for short) have been used in China since 2016, and forecasters have been concerning for its superiority in monitoring convective clouds because heavy and extreme rain processes occurred frequently in 2016. In the current forecasting operation, the delay time of acquiring H8, FY 2 and radar data are 15 min, 35 min and 6 min, respectively. In this article, the H8 infrared data and surface precipitation are used to analyze the initiation of each target convective clouds of 27 heavy rain processes in the 2016 flood season. By comparing with FY 2 satellite and radar observations, we conclude that the observation data of H8 and FY 2 at the same moment have little difference, and their time variation trends are almost the same. However, H8 depicts convection strength more detailedly due to its higher resolution, and it has obvious superiority in monitoring heavy rain convective clouds. It can find the initiation convective clouds 23 min earlier than FY 2 averagely, and 33 min earlier than radar. Combined with hourly and 10 min precipitation data, the 20 July 2016 extreme heavy rain event in North China is analyzed in detail. It is found that there is a remarkable negative correlation between temperature of brightness blackbody (TBB) and surface precipitation, and the amplitude of precipitation varies much larger than TBB. When the peak of TBB moves towards the colder side, the corresponding precipitation magnitude increases, and the type of precipitation turns to cold cloud precipitation gradually.