Distributed representation of spatial information and physical description of hydrological processes are necessary in large river basin because of the highly nonlinear hydrological processes and the variability of the spatial heterogeneity. It is important to represent both geomorphologic properties and land cover char acteristics in hydrological simulation in large river basin. The DBHM (distributed biosphere hydrological model) employs a flow intervals discretization scheme in the representation of geomorphologic properties and a simple biosphere model in the representation of land cover characteristics to simulate integrate hydrological processes in a large river basin. The geomorphologic properties are abstracted from digit elevation model. The hydrological part estimates the surface runoff and calculates the interlayer exchanges within the soil profile and interaction between soil water and groundwater. The land cover characteristics are described by satellite data and the flux transfer between atmosphere and vegetated surface is calculated by a realistic land surface model SiB2. The DBHM can represent the role of both topography and land cover characteristics in hydrological cycle. The model was applied to the Yellow River Basin to investigate its applicability to a region with large variations in topography, land cover and climate. The hydrological simulation has implemented by hourly time step with a spatial resolution of 10 km mesh. The simulated hydrographs were compared with observations for evaluation of the model performance. The results shows evaporation in irrigation districts is much larger than the evaporation in the surrounding area in semi-arid area, indicating human water regulation had affected the hydrological cycle in the Yellow River basin.