The soil moisture over the Tibetan Plateau(TP) ,collectively affected by the snow cover and permafrost,has a long memory of wet and dry of land surface processes.Therefore, the soil moisture over TP,as an important factor of climate change,could be used to forecast the precipitation pattern in East China.However,because of rare observation stations over TP, the soil moisture observation in long time series is very deficient over TP.It leads to most of recent studies were based on reanalysis data,modeling data and satellite remote sensing data(named substitute data) .Moreover, their findings were uncertain and different from the others.Therefore, in this study, studies about the applicability of various kinds of substitute data are summarized firstly, then characteristic of the soil moisture over TP as well as its climate effect are discussed.1) Comparison shows that current substitute data of soil moisture has significant over -or under- valuation over TP.Different conclusion could be drew according to various evaluation indicators and interpolation methods.Comparatively speaking, soil moisture products of SSM /I and FY 3B are in good correlation with observations.2) Soil moisture over TP has significant variations in multitime timescale and remarkable spatial inhomogeneity in decadal trend pattern and interannual characteristic.There is significant ascending trend in spring soil moisture over TP based on SSM /I, in agreement with remarkable warming over TP.Two large interannual variation centers exit in east and west TP,whose related latent heat flux and sensible heating flux could motivate teleconnection wave train to affect precipitation anomaly in Yangtze River.3) Previous studies is different with each other about the effect of soil moisture over TP on precipitation over East China.One of the possible reason is that their substitute data is various with different applicability.Another reason may be the spatial inhomogeneity ignored in modeling design.Related issues need further research.