Over the years, the International Precipitation Conference has stimulated the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and expertise as a way of improving our understanding of precipitation processes, their observations, estimation, modelling and prediction. Beginning with the first conference held in 1986 in Caracas, Venezuela, the series has been an important forum that brings together meteorologists, hydrologists, statisticians and engineers whose research includes interest in precipitation. Results presented and discussed at the nine previous meetings have been published in numerous refereed journal articles and are often widely cited. The series has promoted the importance of such fundamental aspects of precipitation processes as variability across scales in space and time, strong nonlinearity of the involved dynamical process, and the inherent uncertainty involved in precipitation observations and forecasts.

The objective of the 2010 Conference is to continue promoting interdisciplinary discussions of the present state of knowledge in research and applications related to precipitation, with the special theme: "Space‑time precipitation from urban scale to global change". Also, as this is an anniversary event, we hope the conference will provide an opportunity for the precipitation research community to reflect on the past accomplishments and the future needs.