Based on precipitation observations from rain gauges in the Taihu Lake Basin in Jiangsu Province from 1979 to 2019, the ability of MSWEP (multi-source weighted ensemble precipitation) to characterize daily and extreme precipitation with different durations was comprehensively analyzed. Results show that, in general,MSWEP can well reflect daily precipitations in the study area；however, its accuracy is relatively poor in the Huxi and Taihu Lake sub-areas, where hilly area is concentrated and water body is dominated, respectively, and it is difficult for MSWEP to capture rainstorm events on daily scale. MSWEP can roughly reflect the spatial structure of extreme precipitation with different durations in the study area, but there are some differences between MSWEP and gauge observations in details. With the increase of duration, the fitting accuracy of MSWEP extreme precipitation is improved, and MSWEP has a strong ability in characterizing extreme precipitation with a duration of 15d or even longer. There is a significant linear negative correlation between the errors of MSWEP daily precipitation and extreme precipitation and precipitation intensity, and there are obvious phenomena of “low-value overestimation and high-value underestimation”. Moreover, the accuracy of MSWEP is remarkably correlated with spatial scale. On the mean areal scale of the study area, the ability of MSWEP in characterizing daily precipitation and extreme precipitation is higher than that on the grid scale because of the spatial homogenization effect and the elimination of spatial scale mismatching.