<p>The main aim of this paper is to explore the hidden relationships between the spatial and temporal variation of rainfall events and some lithospheric and land characteristics, e.g., altitude, land cover, geo-form, soil, and residential construction in the framework of Mashhad district, northeastern Iran. For this purpose, a set of 16 rain gauge stations was used to estimate and interpolate the rainfall data within the recent decade (2014–2023). Initial findings on spatial and temporal analysis of the rainfall events revealed that rainfall occurrences in recent years (i.e., from 2021 to 2023) suddenly dropped in most of the study area from the mean annual class of &gt; 250&#xa0;mm to the yearly mean class of &lt; 150&#xa0;mm, caused by global climate change effects like in the entire part of Iran. The statistical analysis approved the fundamental correlations between rainfall events and earth surface characteristics of altitude ranges, geo-forms, soil units, and land covers in the study area (r from 0.40 to 0.80), revealing the gain of higher amounts of rainfall occurrences in the higher altitude elevations with shale and phyllite formations, in the fertile and sandy soils with higher values of organic carbon, and in the land covers with rangeland classes instead of farming and residential land uses. This fact revealed the local effect of the elevations when they saturate the moist and cold air mass of westerly winds under the orographic mechanism. Finally, results exposed that the rainfall occurrences during the warm months (from Apr to Sep) can occur dominantly over the lowlands and city yards instead of the mountains and elevations, and each anomalous extreme event of rainfall in these months provides the risky potential of flooding hazards. Also, the findings were approved by the comparison with remotely sensed long-term datasets (1984–2023) in aggregated decadal and monthly periods.</p>