Abstract The 3-km Norwegian Reanalysis (NORA3) is a convection-permitting, nonhydrostatic hindcast for the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, and the Barents Sea as well as the Scandinavian Peninsula. It has a horizontal resolution of 3 km and provides a full three-dimensional atmospheric state for the period 1995–2020 with a surface analysis and boundary conditions from ERA5, a global reanalysis. In complex terrain it is found to outperform both the host reanalysis ERA5 and also the earlier hydrostatic 10-km Norwegian Hindcast Archive (NORA10), in terms of 2-m temperature and daily precipitation. Of particular interest is the representation of extreme rainfall. It is found that the upper percentiles are much better represented than in ERA5, with very little bias up to 99.9%, suggesting that the new hindcast archive is well suited for hydrological mapping and extreme-value analysis of rainfall in complex terrain. Significance Statement High-resolution hindcasts that permit realistic convection allow very detailed modeling of the surface temperature, precipitation, and wind field in complex terrain. There is a need for detailed mapping of rainfall and temperature extremes (upper percentiles) to assess the impact of rapid climate change. We present an assessment of the performance of the model from Part I for near-surface temperature and precipitation, which are found to be much improved in comparison with ERA5 and with earlier NORA10. The focus is on the Norwegian mainland and the Svalbard Archipelago, because the complex terrain found in these regions is challenging to represent in weather prediction models. The improvement in precipitation statistics is particularly pronounced, with nearly unbiased results up to the 99.9th percentile.