Validation of satellite based rainfall data in Poyang Lake catchment

The spatial rainfall is one of the key inputs for the distributed hydrological model, and their precisions heavily affect the accuracy of streamflow predictions from a hydrological model. Satellite-based rainfall products are expected to offer an alternative to ground based rainfall estimates in the present and the foreseeable future. So, the present study mainly deals with the comparison between TRMM rainfall and the rain gauges rainfall at the different time step. The results show that the differences of the maximal daily and 5-day rainfall and annual rainfall between TRMM and rain gauges rainfall are distinctly, and the daily TRMM rainfall are good at determining rain occurrence rather than rainfall amount. The good linear relationships of the monthly TRMM rainfall with monthly rain gauges rainfall data are received. The spatial distributions of annual rainfall from TRMM data are markedly different in different years and can be classified into three types on the whole according to the spatial characteristics.