where PSat and PPF are grid-level monthly accumulated MCS rainfall from satellite-based and PF-based MCS database, respectively. Results show that majority of the monthly rainfall errors are smaller than ±15% and are evenly distributed around 0, suggesting that the PF-based MCS database does not have systematic biases compared with the satellite-based MCS database. Over all 15 warm seasons, the spatial distribution of the amount and percentage of MCS rainfall between the satellite-based and PF-based MCS databases are shown in Supplementary Fig. 9. On average, MCSs account for 40–60% of the warm season total rainfall in the central United States from both databases, consistent with previous studies1112. Their spatial distributions also agree quite well (Supplementary Fig. 9).