This paper analyses the skills of fuzzy computing based rainfall-runoff model in real time flood forecasting. The potential of fuzzy computing has been demonstrated by developing a model for forecasting the river flow of Narmada basin in India. This work has demonstrated that fuzzy models can take advantage of their capability to simulate the unknown relationships between a set of relevant hydrological data such as rainfall and river flow. Many combinations of input variables were presented to the model with varying structures as a sensitivity study to verify the conclusions about the coherence between precipitation, upstream runoff and total watershed runoff. The most appropriate set of input variables was determined, and the study suggests that the river flow of Narmada behaves more like an autoregressive process. As the precipitation is weighted only a little by the model, the last time-steps of measured runoff are dominating the forecast. Thus a forecast based on expected rainfall becomes very inaccurate. Although good results for one-step-ahead forecasts are received, the accuracy deteriorates as the lead time increases. Using the one-step-ahead forecast model recursively to predict flows at higher lead time, however, produces better results as opposed to different independent fuzzy models to forecast flows at various lead times. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.