Using the highland catchment of the Grabinka river located in the Wisłoka drainage basin as an example we assessed the capability of Snyder’s and Clark’s synthetic unit hydrograph (SUH) to simulate flood wave. Calibration for model parameters was based on a rainfall episode recorded in June 2006. We adopted the minimum of the objective function as an optimisation criterion. The quality of the models was evaluated using the efficiency coefficient E. Analysis showed that both Snyder’s and Clark’s SUH describe properly the observed wave, with the first model yielding somewhat better results. For both SUH the times to culmination were the same as for the observed wave, whereas the calculated culmination discharge differed from the observed one: for Snyder’s SUH it was 0.11% higher, and for Clark’s SUH 1.9% lower than the observed discharge.

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