Abstract: This paper reviewed the research situation of estimates of paleoprecipitation in closed lake basin,and on the basis of recent works carried out in the Tibetan Plateau,analysed the method,principle and preliminary results,and gave some advices on the research work in the future. It was Lettau(1969) who first estimated the precipitation of closed lake basin based on the combined hydrological and energy balances of Palae-catchment. Then, Kutzbach(1980) developed two versions of the model:the first version is one in which precipitation and lake area are linearly related,and the second one is the relationship of the precipitation and lake area is nonlinear because the runoff ratio and Bowen ratio of the basin are made functions of precipitation. These studies provide the theoretical framework for estimates of paleoprecipitation from water budget and surface energy budget considerations. Many researchers,such as,Hastenrath et al.(1983,1985), Swain et al.(1983), Benson(1985), Adams et al.(1985),Winkler(1986),Fang(1989), Wu(1993), Qin(1993,1997),Guo(2000) followed this approach to study many paleolakes worldwide. However,the authors do not think it is appropriate to follow the above researches to ensure the parameters. Thus,a lot of works had been carried out in closed catchments of Asian Monsoon area in the last three years,the authors firsly applied the method of searching-for similar area in present atlas to ensure some parameters,such as,fractional cloud cover,surface albedo,surface vapor pressure,and so on, based on the considerations of water budget and surface energy budget of the whole catchment. In the end,the authors give some advices on improvements of this method. For example,we think it is the combined effect of humidity and temperature of paleoclimate,shown Rb/Sr sediment and salinity of paleolake,that is the best parameters to search for the appropriately similar area.