Evidence for urban rainfall enhancement (URE) is largely (not solely) drawn from location-specific analyses of observations and/or case-based numerical simulations. Thus, it is difficult to robustly assess the role of regional climate in dictating the presence/absence and magnitude of the URE or whether URE scales with rainfall rate (RR). Here we employ the Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission (IMERG) V07 dataset to perform a uniquely detailed paired-sample analysis of data from 47 major conurbations in the USA and Canada and equivalent non-urban samples drawn from proximal rural areas of equal elevation. We show:

• The probability of precipitation (PoP) is generally higher in the conurbations. For rural areas southwest of each of the conurbations (and thus nominally ‘upwind’), only 6 of the 47 paired samples indicate a higher probability of non-zero precipitation than the urban sample.
• Mean annual total precipitation (totP) over each urban area is typically (but not uniformly) statistically higher than that in four equivalent adjacent non-urban areas. E.g. totP over the urban grid cells exceeds that from the pool of rural grid cells for over two-thirds of conurbations. This amplification of totP has a strong, consistent, spatial signature.
• The probability distribution of RR over each conurbation and the adjacent non-urban areas does not typically offer evidence that the upper percentiles are enhanced over the urban areas. Indeed, for most of the conurbations the right tail of the RR probability distribution extends to higher rates in the non-urban samples.

These results thus imply that major urban areas across North America do, indeed, typically receive more precipitation than adjacent non-urban areas but intense precipitation does not preferentially occur over cities. However, there is evidence that the regional climate plays a key role in dictating the hydroclimatic response to urban areas. For example, Phoenix and Tucson in Arizona, two of the cities with the lowest totP and PoP, both exhibit a higher PoP over urban grid cells, higher totP and urban amplification of the 90^th percentile RR. These results and this presentation argue for a more nuanced approach to assessment of urban rainfall enhancement to better inform efforts to reduce urban flooding.