Abstract. Floods continue to devastate societies and their economies. Resilient societies commonly incorporate flood forecasting into their strategy to mitigate the impact of floods. Hydrological models which simulate the rainfall-runoff process are at the core of flood forecasts. To date operational flood forecasting models use areal rainfall estimates that are based on geographical features. This paper introduces a new methodology to optimally blend the weighting of gauges for the purpose of obtaining superior flood forecasts. For a selection of 7 Australian catchments this methodology was able to yield improvements of 15.3 % and 7.1 % in optimization and evaluation periods respectively. Catchments with a low gauge density, or an overwhelming majority of gauges with a low proportion of observations available, are not well suited to this new methodology. Models which close the water balance and demonstrate internal model dynamics that are consistent with a conceptual understanding of the rainfall-runoff process yielded consistent improvement in streamflow simulation skill.