The classification,development work and recent advances of regional climate models are reviewed comprehensively in this paper.Great advances in regional climate model have been made in the recent years.The main advances are:introduing snow-cover and soil-water into regional climate models;the development of the regional climate model nested in a general circulation model from 1D to 3D and from 1 layer to multi-layers;the development of more reasonable parameterization schemes.But there are still some defalts,such as,the inadequate calculation method of vegetation cover in desert,and rough depection in sub-grid topogtaphy and turbulent flux transfer etc.Therefore,nonlinear methods(fractal etc) for the retrieval of remote sensing date and the multi-scale two-direction nesting are suggesed to be used in future regional climate simulations.