Different spatial resolutions of soil physical properties,including field capacity,soil porosity and saturated hydraulic conductivity,were used as input data for water flow model for lake catchment(WATLAC) model to simulate the hydrological processes of the Xitiaoxi catchment from 2005 to 2010 and evaluate the effects of the spatial distribution of soil physical properties on groundwater recharge,soil evaporation,runoff generation and their components.Results show that the simulated stream flow hydrographs with different spatial resolutions of the soil physical properties reproduced the observed hydrographs well.There might be no significant increase in model accuracy as more precise information on the soil physical properties was used.The groundwater recharges simulated using the refined spatial information on soil physical properties were greatly lower than those using the conventional soil type data,but had a slight effect on soil evaporation values.The two soil data cases showed a similar simulated result and spatial distribution.Although different spatial resolutions of the soil physical properties did not cause apparent difference in overall stream flow,their effect on the partition of surface and subsurface water flows was distinct.