An artificial neural network model was developed to analyze and forecast Short-term river runoff from the Naju watershed, in Korea. Error back propagation neural networks (EBPN) of hourly rainfall and runoff data were found to have a high performance in forecasting runoff. The number of hidden nodes were optimized using total error and Bayesian information criterion. Model forecasts are very accurate (i.e., relative error is less than 3% and R² is greater than 0.99) for calibration and verification data sets. Increasing the time horizon for application data sets, thus mating the model suitable for flood forecasting. decreases the accuracy of the model. The resulting optimal EBPN models for forecasting hourly runoff consists of ten rainfall and four runoff data(ANN0410 model) and ten rainfall and ten runoff data(ANN1010 model). Performances of the ANN0410 and ANN1010 models remain satisfactory up to 6 hours (i.e., R² is greater than 0.92).