Rain Cell Dataset Associated with Frontal and Warm-Sector Precipitation during the Pre-Summer Season in South China

This dataset covers the South China region during the pre-summer rainy season (April to June) from 2015 to 2024. Initial rain cells were identified from the GPM-IMERG dataset, where cells with rainfall intensity greater than 1 mm/h were classified as general rain cells, and those exceeding 10 mm/h were classified as heavy rain cells. Frontal positions at 925 hPa and environmental fields at 850 hPa were extracted from the ERA5 gridded products. These environmental fields were high-pass filtered to remove longwave components with wavelengths greater than 2000 km.Based on the initial rain cells, frontal positions, and high-pass filtered environmental fields, a series of processing steps were conducted, including rain cell identification and classification. Rainfall over ocean areas and during typhoon-affected periods was excluded to obtain the final set of rain cells. Frontal-associated rain cells were categorized into eight types according to their distance from the front. Heavy rain cells were further analyzed to identify warm-sector heavy rain cells, which were then subdivided into four categories.For each final rain cell, we extracted information including the centroid location, grid points it covers, 3-hour rainfall at each grid point, maximum rainfall intensity, and the location of the maximum rainfall. Each cell is also labeled with its corresponding classification category.This dataset facilitates the study of frontal and warm-sector heavy precipitation during the pre-summer rainy season in South China and provides a solid foundation for improving convective parameterization in precipitation modeling.