Background Extreme precipitation events occurred frequently in China due to the climate change and global warming, resulting in severe soil erosion events and huge property and personnel losses, such as the torrential rains in Wudinghe Basin in 2017. Thus, studies on the extreme precipitation events and their spatial-temporal variations are of great importance for soil and water conservation planning and management. Currently, there are abundant researches on this issue across China, however, the results of these studies have not been fully and comprehensively analyzed, which limited us for better understanding the extreme precipitation events in China.

Methods In this study, s researches on extreme precipitation in China have been collected, important information such as the extreme precipitation indices, diagnostic methods for trend analysis, interpolation methods for spatial interpolation, and the results on spatial-temporal variations were extracted from literatures according to different regions of China and then, summarized and compared with each other with carefulness.

Results After the comprehensively review of published literature, it is found that the spatial-temporal trends were mainly analyzed based on daily precipitation from meteorological stations and a nonsignificant increasing trend for extreme precipitation was reported on the national scale, of which, the increasing trends were mainly in South China and Southwest China, while the decreasing trends in North China, Northwest China and Northwest China. However, there are still some deficiencies which may limit the further researches:first, currently the densities of rain gauges in many studies are usually sparse; second, the effects of topographical factors on extreme precipitation are usually not taken consideration, probably due to the rain gauges are sited preferably in the flatland; third, the spatial-temporal trends may be greatly affected by the inter-decadal quasi-periodic oscillations in rainfall since the study period in many studies are relatively short. These deficiencies may have lower down the reliability of current studies and then make different studies less comparable. Under this circumstance, some advices aiming to improve the further studies have been proposed in this study:first, more meteorological station should be established quickly to get more available precipitation data; second, studies on the effects of topographic factors on extreme precipitation should be strengthened, which can be initiated from small scale watershed with plenty rainfall and hydrological data and then extend to wider regions; third, the precipitation data from meteorological stations should be used combinedly with spatial coverage data, such as TRMM to improve the station based data.

Conclusions The researches on extreme precipitation events in China have been reviewed from published literature in this study, it can bee seen that many valuable results have been reported while there are still some deficiencies. Some advices were proposed in this study for future researches and it is expected more valuable results can be acquired in the future, which are also important for practical works, such as flood control, soil conservation, etc..