Abstract:Heavy rainfall and flash floods pose severe threats to people’s lives, property, and social and economic development. This study focuses on the Xigou reservoir basin in Yiwu County, Hami City, using historical precipitation data from 1961 to 2023. The FloodArea model and return period functions were employed to estimate the areal rainfall of extreme precipitation events under different return periods and to simulate flood inundation risks. The results show that the maximum daily precipitation in the Xigou basin has significantly increased from 1961 to 2023, with an average increase of 2.1 mm per decade, especially evident since the late 1980s. During the major rainfall event in the Hami mountainous area on July 31, 2018, the precipitation peaked around 6:00 AM, leading to rapid surface runoff and a significant expansion of the inundation range and depth. Using SPSS and MuDFiT tools, the areal rainfall for return periods of 100, 50, 30, 20, 10, and 5 years were determined to be 51.83 mm, 34.94 mm, 26.23 mm, 20.62 mm, 13.70 mm, and 8.93 mm, respectively. The simulation results indicate that the inundation range and depth increase significantly with the return period, and the areal rainfall for 30 years or more reaches the heavy rainfall standard of Xinjiang. The vulnerability assessment of disaster-bearing bodies shows that vulnerability increases significantly with the increase in flood return period. For a 100-year flood with a inundation depth exceeding 1.8 meters, the affected population and GDP proportions are as high as 60.87% and 54.03%, respectively. These findings highlight the far-reaching impact of severe floods on society and the economy, emphasizing the need for more stringent disaster prevention and mitigation measures.