With changes in weather patterns and intensifying anthropogenic water use, there is an increasing need for spatio-temporal information on water fluxes and stocks in river basins. The assortment of satellite-derived open-access information sources on rainfall (P) and land use/land cover (LULC) is currently being expanded with the application of actual evapotranspiration (ET_act) algorithms on the global scale. We demonstrate how global remotely sensed P and ET_act datasets can be merged to examine hydrological processes such as storage changes and streamflow prior to applying a numerical simulation model. The study area is the Red River Basin in China in Vietnam, a generally challenging basin for remotely sensed information due to frequent cloud cover. Over this region, several satellite-based P and ET_act products are compared, and performance is evaluated using rain gauge records and longer-term averaged streamflow. A method is presented for fusing multiple satellite-derived ET_act estimates to generate an ensemble product that may be less susceptible, on a global basis, to errors in individual modeling approaches. Subsequently, monthly satellite-derived rainfall and ET_act are combined to assess the water balance for individual subcatchments and types of land use, defined using a global land use classification improved based on auxiliary satellite data. It was found that a combination of TRMM rainfall and the ensemble ET_act product is consistent with streamflow records in both space and time. It is concluded that monthly storage changes, multi-annual streamflow and water yield per LULC type in the Red River Basin can be successfully assessed based on currently available global satellite-derived products.

Understanding changes in precipitation extremes is critical for designing mitigation measures for the potential implications of a warming climate. This study assessed changes in the magnitude and frequency of precipitation extremes over Vietnam using high-quality gridded daily precipitation observations from 1980 to 2010. The annual maxima precipitation was analyzed to detect historical changes in the magnitude of precipitation extremes, while the number of heavy precipitation events, defined using the peak-over-threshold approach, was used to assess changes in the frequency of precipitation extremes. We found a strong signal of changes in the frequency of heavy precipitation, with 28.3% of Vietnam’s landmass exhibiting significant increasing trends. The magnitude of annual maxima precipitation shows a mixed pattern of changes, with less than 10% of Vietnam’s landmass exhibiting significant (both increasing and decreasing) trends. To identify possible mechanisms driving changes in precipitation, we assessed the relationship between inter-annual variations in precipitation extremes and climate variability represented by the teleconnection patterns of the Northern Hemisphere. Using five climate indices, we found that teleconnections across the Indian and Pacific Oceans have implied large control over the characteristics of precipitation extremes across Vietnam, with up to 30% of Vietnam’s landmass exhibiting a significant relationship.

To control water resources in many domains such as agriculture, flood forecasting, and hydro-electrical dams, forecasting water level needs to predict. In this article, a new computational approach using a data driven model and time series is proposed to calculate the forecast water level in short time. Concretely, wavelet-artificial neural network (WAANN) and time series (TS) are combined together called WAANN-TS that encourages the advantage of each model. For this real time project work, Yen Bai station, Northwest Vietnam was chosen as an experimental case study to apply the proposed model. Input variables into the Wavelet-ANN structure is water level data. Time series and ANN models are built, and their performances are compared. The results indicate the greater accuracy of the proposed models at Hanoi station. The final proposal WAANN−TS for water level forecasting shows good performance with root mean square error (RMSE) from 10−10 to 10−11.