<p>The study investigated the behaviour of the rising limb of the runoff hydrograph under varying rainfall intensities (150 to 600 lph) under six different land cover compositions, with varying proportions of vegetation cover (VC) and impervious cover (IC) from 0 to 100% in a small catchment area (2 m²) through controlled laboratory experimentation. A total of 72 experiments were performed to analyse their effects on time to peak (t_p), lag time (t_L), slope, and peak runoff (Q_p). A regression model is developed to fit experimental data and capture the relationship between runoff and process variables, such as rainfall intensity, percentage land cover (both VC and IC), and time, to predict runoff. The model performance was compared with seven different regression models using the Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE), coefficient of determination (R²) and percentage bias (PBias). The study demonstrates significantly accelerated hydrograph response with diminishing t_p and t_L along the steeper rising limb under high rainfall intensities. This behaviour becomes more intense when imperviousness increases within the catchment, suggesting dominant control of land cover. Overall, the developed model (M8) demonstrated good performance in capturing the nonlinear interaction between rainfall intensity and land cover composition with NSE (0.91), R² (0.90) and PBias (-0.48%). However, the polynomial regression model (M2) outperformed (both R² and NSE = 0.93) but showed a higher negative PBias of 5.12. The developed model accurately reproduced the behaviour of the rising limb across all scenarios. The proposed model highlighted the critical role of imperviousness in amplifying flood response.</p>