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In Amazonia, hydroelectric power production has only been developed on large basins, which are the only ones that have been gauged. This excludes innumerable small catchments, for which only rainfall data are available. Therefore, the objective of the work presented in this paper is to develop a hydrological rainfall–runoff model to simulate flow duration curves for hydro power production planning. The model is based on a linear and time-invariant system (input–output). The impulse response of the system is calculated from the cross-spectral analysis between the rainfall and runoff series. This response is optimized successive approximations to minimize the root mean square of the error. The test catchment area has 7 years of rainfall and runoff data; 4 years are considered for the calibration and 3 years for the validation of the model. A sensitivity analysis of the model to the sample size is carried out to determine the shortest possible data period that produces results comparable to those of the model validation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]