Mean annual precipitation is 321 mm, and most rainfall (70%) occurs as patchy, often intense convective storms during the warm months (Lauenroth & Sala, 1992; Lauenroth & Burke, 2008). While most rain events are small (83% are ≤ 10 mm), these account for only 41% of total growing season rainfall; therefore, infrequent large rain events are important in this ecosystem and can be identified from long-term precipitation records such as this dataset. Precipitation amounts from 30 manual rain gauges distributed across the site from May thru September are usually recorded within 24 hours of a rain event. Data were verified with cross-validation of records contained in the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP, 1980-present). An additional processed dataset is included, for which the authors identified isolated summer (June-September) deluge events. They define a deluge as a statistically large event size that exceeds the 90th percentile based on the long-term precipitation record (Post & Knapp, 2021). For this analysis, they summed precipitation from rain events that co-occurred temporally (typically over 2-4 days) and considered these as single deluge events.