Detailed vertical soil moisture profile is very essential for hydrological modeling and is also often used as important diagnostic information for better understanding the surface-atmospheric interactions.The distributed hydrological model ESSI developed by our group previously has been demonstrated with such capability to simulate soil moisture of study watershed,however,for the detailed vertical soil moisture profile simulations it is still beyond its functions.This paper presents a modified ESSI distributed hydrological model that is suitable for comparing and assimilating the remotely sensed soil moisture by integrating a soil water parameterization scheme which is able to numerically calculates soil water transportations between different soil layers based on the 1D Richards equation.The newly modified ESSI hydrological model was applied to the Jinghe river basin situated in the upper stream of the Huanghe River Basin,China.The preliminary simulation experiments indicates that model performs well to reasonably predict the vertical soil water moisture profile and the modeling efficiency in stream-flow predictions is also higher than the original ESSI hydrological model does.