As an important component of land surface, the lake has been paid wide attention because of its role in the weather and climate prediction. And the related researches become a hot topic in the atmospheric science. This paper mainly summaries the basic classification, current understanding of the physical processes and parameterization schemes in the lake models. We further discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different schemes and compare their simulation results. Current lake models show a better simulation on the shallow lake, and need improvement in the deep and/or freezing lake simulations. Future work are required to build new parameterization schemes suitable for the deep, large and freezing lakes, and to construct new models suitable for all types of lakes. Any improvement in the lake models is suggested to be strongly dependent on the observational data of global lakes with high quality in the future.