Nine rainfall events affecting southern China in the 2020 summer were studied by a novel anomaly-based synoptic analysis approach, and the results were compared to those of standard synoptic analysis. These rainfall events occurred in the Dragon-boat rainy season and Meiyu rainy season from the Pearl River to the Yangtze and Huaihe rivers and did not entirely follow the climatic seasonal march of the summer monsoon. The first rainfall event occurred within the Dragon-boat rainy season and was associated with a broad rainfall area with scattered precipitation centers related to a broad convergence area of anomalous flows with scattered moist vorticity anomaly (MVA) centers located between two anomalous anticyclonic systems at 925 hPa. The other eight rainfall events appeared in the Meiyu rainy season and were generally associated with only a narrow convergence belt of anomalous flows and a positive MVA belt, sometimes with an anomalous cyclone moving eastward in the lower troposphere. The ECMWF model successfully predicted these anomalous convergence areas and MVA belts with lead times of 2–7 days. The advantages of this anomaly-based analysis approach include its ability to visually identify the location of a rainfall event, pinpoint possible meteorological causes and extend the model forecast length by the earlier detection of predictors.