This review summarizes some recent research advancements about the orographic influences on surface precipitation. The orographic dynamical and thermodynamical effects and their influences on precipitation and cloud physics are analyzed in detail. Emphasis is put on the orographic influences on the precipitation produced by weather systems of different scales, including climatic scale, synoptic scale, mesoscale convective systems. The existing problems in this field relevant to observation and analysis, climatic statistics, theoretical analysis and model simulation are discussed, and an outlook for this field is given. 