Performance of Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation estimate over northern Vietnam

The Red River, whose basin occupies main part of northern Vietnam, is an important river running through Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. It sometimes makes floods in the flat delta region. The upstream is surrounded by complex topography with several mountain ranges on a scale of 10–100 km. Therefore, satellite-borne radar observation of rainfall plays a crucial role in flood forecasts in this region. The Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation (GSMaP) dataset is based mainly on the microwave radar and imager observation on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellites (Aonashi et al. 2009; Ushio et al. 2009). We investigated reproducibility of hourlyand daily-scale rainfall in the GSMaP with in situ rain gauge data (hereafter gauge rainfall) in northern Vietnam. Moreover, the reproducibility was related with vertical profiles of precipitation and lower tropospheric winds. The purpose of this study is to validate the GSMaP for hydrological forecasting.