Observations retrieved from radiometers aboard several satellites are combined in the Global Precipitation Measurement mission (GPM) to provide a global precipitation dataset. Radiometers are able to sense the radiance naturally emitted by the Earth's surface or emitted/scattered by hydrometeors. These observations, also known as brightness temperatures, are converted into precipitation estimates by the GPM Profiling Algorithm (GPROF). Although this algorithm is already in use for several decades and the conversion of brightness temperatures to precipitation estimates in general has been studied extensively, persistent challenges remain. Two of these challenges are: 1. the retrieval of precipitation formed close to the Earth’s surface, also referred to as shallow precipitation, and 2. low-intensity precipitation. Increased understanding of the physics behind these precipitation types will help to improve the accuracy of the conversion of brightness temperatures to precipitation. This study couples observations from radiometers to both ground-based precipitation observations and reflectivity profiles from ground-based weather radars over the Netherlands. The Netherlands is an ideal study area for this purpose as both precipitation types (shallow and low-intensity) occur regularly over the Netherlands (~52°N) and high-quality (gauge-adjusted) radar data is available. We use brightness temperatures from conical scanning radiometers belonging to the GPM in this study. Firstly, we investigate the relationship between brightness temperatures from different channels (frequency-dependent) and precipitation intensities. Within this analysis we try to take the effect of different footprint sizes of the different channels (related to the differences in the employed radio frequencies) into account, in order to limit the dependence of the retrieved relations on the footprint size. Secondly, we couple the observations of the radiometers with ground-based radar reflectivity profiles to gain insight in the vertical structure of the precipitation types and how these affect brightness temperatures.@en