Abstract: The study of distributed hydrological model and hydrological scale is a focus on hydrology now,especially to different drainage basin scale and arid land.The distributed model based on GIS and remote sensing can simulate flow of any area in a watershed.It is an effective approach for reflecting spatially-varied complexities in watershed systems.In this paper,a distributive hydrological model was developed to simulate runoff in a arid climate,sparse vegetation.The model was then applied to a case study in the Sangong River Basin,which is one of the most representative catchments in the Xinjiang Provence.Based on the RS and GIS technique,the DEM and Land Cover of the study basin was successfully used to delineate the stream network,subbasin and extract information of catchment characteristics.The results show satisfactory accuracy for runoff simulation.Especially,the integrated hydrological models can be used for simulating both runoff and thaw ,which provide a useful tool for water resources management of arid land area.This study is an attempt to develop a distributed rainfal-l runoff model for river basins in the arid land area.The developed model can also be extended to larger basins. Further works of field survey and investigation would be helpful for better calibrating critical parameters and thus improving performance of the developed model.

Key words: distributed hydrological model, Sangong river basin, GIS and remote sensing