In an effort to study the severe rainfall event of 4-5th July 2000 in Beijing (with 24h accumulated precipitation of 240 mm), we perform numerical simulations to investigate this event using the MM5v3.6 model. The model is initialized with the MM5/WRF 3DVAR analysis, which incorporates the ground-based GPS precipitable water vapor, automatic and conventional meteorological observations in its assimilation step. For 24 h accumulated precipitation forecast, the threat scores are 0.72, 0.76, 0.67 and 0.63, for thresholds of 1, 5, 10, and 20 mm, respectively. Holding other factors unchanged, sensitivity experiments were conducted with different topographic resolutions of 110, 50 and 3.7 km to investigate the topographic effects on precipitation over the Beijing area. In these sensitivity experiments, we attempt to preserve the realistic orographic distribution in the model topography under the condition of keeping the dynamic-thermodynamic consistency of the initial model atmosphere to the extent possible. Results indicate that the unique topographic distribution and variations in the Beijing area play an important role in determining the location, distribution and intensity of heavy precipitation.