**5. Conclusions**

This study applied all the historical TCs landfalling along the Southeast China coast from 1953 to 2011 to explore a statistical boxplot scheme to forecast the maximum daily (R24) and 3-day accumulative rainfall (R72) at a certain rain gauge (SMS) during TC-landfalling period. Three TC's characteristics, including TC's landfalling direction, landfalling distance to SMS, and landfalling intensity, are considered to categorize all the historical TCs landfalling within the distance of 700 km to SMS. The corresponding historical daily rainfall records at SMS during the TC-landfalling period (rainfall within a couple of days before and after TC landfalling) are collected and organized according to the TC's category. The organized rainfall records for each TC category are analyzed by percentile estimation. The results are plotted in boxplots. It is concluded from the boxplots that the rainfall at a certain area is generally positively correlated to the intensity of the landfalling TC within 200-km distance to the landfalling center. Within the distance of 400 km to the landfalling location, the rainfall at SMS is generally negatively associated with the distance between TC's landfalling center and SMS. With the same intensity scale, TCs landfalling on the west of SMS will generally bring heavier rainfall at SMS than TCs landfalling on the east of SMS within the distance of 400 km. Eleven tropical cyclones landfalling within the distance of 700 km to SMS in 2012 and 2013 are used to evaluate the performance of the statistical boxplots to predict short-term rainfall at SMS. Results show that the boxplot scheme is very valuable to forecasters to provide rainfall range due to each TC category. For most of the time, the observed rainfall due to a landfalling TC is within the range of the historical rainfall records.

The boxplot scheme is easy to implement. The rainfall boxplots are quite helpful to operational forecasters. As of this writing, the technique is already in use as a valuable reference at SZMB to predict the short-term rainfall at SMS due to TCs.
