Abstract: From the DEM data of Shuibuya catchment in the Qingjiang River upstream basin,the digital river network was extracted,the basin boundary was delineated,and the topographic index distribution of this region was calculated.A DEMbased distributed hydrological model (DDRM),which was proposed by Xiong et al.(2004),was applied to simulate the rainfallrunoff processes in the study region.The simulation results of the DEMbased distributed model were compared with that of the Xinanjiang River model in terms of the NashSutcliffe coefficient of efficiency,the relative errors of both peak flow and the total runoff amount.The conclusion can be drawn that the DEMbased distributed hydrological model performs as well as the Xinanjiang River model.The Xinanjiang River model,in terms of the total runoff amount simulation,is slightly better than the DDRM.When it refers to the NashSutcliffe coefficient of efficiency,the two models resemble each other.However,in simulation of peak flow and the time it appears,the DDRM shows a litter better result.Compared with the Xinanjiang River model，the DEMbased distributed hydrological model has advantages of simple structure,parsimonious parameters,and concise description of physical process.Besides,the DEMbased distributed model has the ability to simulate the spatial distribution of soil water storage and runoff amount.