Abstract The single-point measurement method for discharge estimation, which was first introduced by Maghrebi, can be implemented to obtain the discharge at different stages of a river during a flood event. As an advantage of this method, discharge can be estimated automatically with a fixed measurement location in the river section or on the water surface, which is associated with minimum energy and cost consumptions. For the proposed model, we determine the isovel contours in a normalized form for the cross section of the flow. To do so, we need to apply the field or experimental data, concerning the cross sectional geometry at different stages and its roughness variation along the wetted perimeter to the model. Then we collect the data of the single fixed-point of velocity measurement at the flow section using a velocity current meter. To validate the method, it is applied to a flume with different cases of roughened walls. The obtained results of stage–discharge curves using the single point of measurement in comparison to the observed experimental ones show that this method can quickly and accurately estimate the flood discharges. The maximum deviation between the observed and calculated discharges for most of observations is less than 5%.

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