Abstract: The correlations and regularity of storm floods exist in various stages of their development. Taking the upper reach of the Yangtze River as an example, we classified 67 storm flood indexes as seven categories, including precipitation, flood, initial state indexes, time, the relationship between storm and flood, reservoir shape and process. Four indicators including total rainfall, rainfall duration, initial rising flow and flood rising rate were optimized as the similar flood discrimination indicators by collating storm flood historical data, extracting storm-flood processes and calculating their characteristic values, and combining with runoff similarity, flood peak similarity, flood process similarity and grey correlation degree. Taking 113 floods of the Three Gorges Reservoir inflow for similarity test samples, several typical floods were chosen to search the similar history floods. The results showed that there were high similarity between them and the deterministic coefficients were all above 0.9, indicating that the four indicators had highly reference value to guide the real-time flood forecasting. The results have been applied to the upper reach of the Yangtze River above the Three Gorges Reservoir, and it has a good effect in finding historical similar floods.