Accurate and reliable streamflow forecasting plays an important role in various aspects of water resources management such as reservoir scheduling and water supply. This paper shows the development of a novel hybrid model for streamflow forecasting and demonstrates its efficiency. In the proposed hybrid model for streamflow forecasting, the empirical wavelet transform (EWT) is firstly employed to eliminate the redundant noises from the original streamflow series. Secondly, the partial autocorrelation function (PACF) values are explored to identify the inputs for the artificial neural network (ANN) models. Thirdly, the weights and biases of the ANN architecture are tuned and optimized by the multi-verse optimizer (MVO) algorithm. Finally, the simulated streamflow is obtained using the well-trained MVO-ANN model. The proposed hybrid model has been applied to annual streamflow observations from four hydrological stations in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, China. Parallel experiments using non-denoising models, the back propagation neural network (BPNN) and the ANN optimized by the particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO-ANN) have been designed and conducted to compare with the proposed model. Results obtained from this study indicate that the proposed hybrid model can capture the nonlinear characteristics of the streamflow time series and thus provides more accurate forecasting results.