Аннотация:Abstract. The main purpose of this investigation is the evaluation of the diffusive groundwater recharge by using point-scale simulation of surface and subsurface water balance. The well-known package HydruS-1d (Šimůnek et al., 2008; Šimůnek et al., 2009) was used for groundwater recharge estimations based on long term meteorological data with daily resolution for the watershed in vicinity of Voronezh city, russia. The climate of this region is characterized by a relatively long winter period, thus initial meteorological data such as precipitation cannot be used directly as the atmospheric boundary condition in HydruS. This data must be preprocessed to take snow accumulation and snow melting, evaporation from snow and vegetation cover, and soil freezing-defrosting processes into account. for this purpose, SurfBal (grinevskiy, Pozdniakov, 2010; grinevskiy, Pozdniakov, 2011), a special preprocessing code for simulating surface and top soil water energy balances and generating upper boundary conditions for HydruS-1d was used. Thus at the first stage of the simulation the SurfBal calculates (based on daily values of precipitation, air temperature and humidity) the surface water and energy balance including: interception by canopy, surface (leaf and snow) evaporation, snow accumulation, consolidation of snowpack and its melting, top soil freezing status and surface runoff, as well as initial potential values of evaporation, transpiration and water inflow to soil. These results are the input values for the next stage of simulation the unsaturated flow with root water uptake using HydruS-1d. for the field study, the three typical sites with different vadose zone parameters and top soils were selected. The top soils at two sites were chernozem soil on the sandy loam, while at the third site the topsoil is sandy soils on sands. The groundwater level depth at all sites is more than 10 m. The results of water balance and groundwater recharge simulations using SurfBal and HydruS-1d under various landscapes and soil cover for the studied watershed showed the strong dependence of annual recharge and its long-term variation from types of topsoil and underlying soil parameters. The largest recharge values were obtained for sandy soils on sand profile, and the smallest values were obtained for the profile with 2 m thick chernozem. Keywords: groundwater recharge, chernozem, flux in the vadose zone, water balance, simulation