Abstract: Since the first operational Doppler radar network was established in the United States of America in the early 1990's,significant progress has been made on the research and application of radar data assimilation. China installed its operational Doppler radar network in the early 2000's, and has widely used for real-time detecting and warning the convective weather,precipitation and tropical cyclone. However, the attempt to assimilate Doppler radar data into numerical weather prediction (NWP) models for the improvement of model initial conditions is just begun. In this paper, we review the past effort and progress on assimilating radar data into NWP models, in order to promote the research and development in this important field.