Evaluation of the Latest Satellite-Based Precipitation Products Through Pixel-Point Comparison and Hydrological Application Over the Mekong River Basin

In this study, the latest released satellite based precipitation products - Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission Level 3 product Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) and version 7 of Tropic Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM 3B42V7) data is evaluated and applied with a distributed hydrological model to examine the precipitation detection and performance in hydrological simulating over the Mekong River Basin (MRB) during 2014/4/1 to 2016/1/31. About 137 rain gauges stations were collected to carry out a pixel-point comparison between observation and satellite precipitation. Moreover, daily discharge observation data from five discharge gauges were used to evaluate the performance of hydrological simulation. The result demonstrate that: 1) IMERG data show more precision in both heavy and light rain detection than 3B42V7; 2) IMERG performs better than 3B42V7 when driving hydrologic model, giving the fact that the simulated discharge result from IMERG is more accurate and stable.