Glaciers are the most visible indicators of global climate change. The climate change resulted in glacier retreat in most of the world′s mountainous area. Glacier variation will have an extensive and profound influence on ecological and environmental security and the social economy in the future. Because of glacier retreat, hydrological processes have changed observably in lots of watersheds, especially for snow and glacier watershed in high mountainous area. However, the spatial and temporal variations of snow and glacier melt water as well as the contribution of glacier runoff to total runoff are uncertain. Accurate calculation of glacier melt water′s contribution to total runoff is part and parcel of risk assessment of climate change and sustainable management of water resources in glacierized basin. Calculating the contribution of glacier runoff to total runoff is a challenging work for the reason that the glacial ablation process and hydrological process are complicated and the terrain as well as the elevation and the gradient of glacierized basin are complex. Detailed meteorological, hydrological, glacial observation data are usually limited to a few accessible and well-studied basins. There are various approaches for quantifying the contribution of glacier runoff to total runoff. Here we examine five different methodological approaches: direct discharge measurement, glaciological approaches, hydrological balance equations, hydrochemical tracers, and hydrological modeling. Hydrological modeling represents the most frequently applied approaches to quantifying the proportional contribution of glacial melt water. Because the temperature is usually easiest to acquire and more suitable for interpolate, the glacier melt module in hydrological model is mainly based on the temperature-index approach and the enhanced temperature-index approach. The energy balance model based on the physical mechanism, which needs more input parameters and has more complex structure, is difficult to couple with hydrological model so far, however energy balance model coupled with distributed hydrological model will be research emphasis in the future. Expanding the regional scale research achievement to remote areas and establishing the physical distributed large scale hydrological model coupled with glacier melt module could be a research prospect.