An automatic identification method to identify tropical,convective and stratiform rainfall types by using the radar data like horizontal gradient,vertical gradient,echo top,VPR(vertical profile of radar reflectivity) is proposed in this paper.Based on the data of seven rainfall events observed by the radar in Guangzhou from May to August in 2008,the performance of this algorithm is compared with another method which only divides precipitation into two types of convective and stratiform.The results show that the method can automatically identify the distribution area of precipitation effectively.It can also improve the accuracy of radar-based quantitative precipitation estimation.