One of the major difficulties in the seismic analysis of a dam-reservoir system is the treatment of the energy radiation in the upstream direction of the reservoir. In the paper, a new transmitting boundary is presented that can model properly the radiation of energy in the far field direction of a semi-infinite reservoir with constant depth. In the newly developed method, effects of surface wave motion are taken into accounted and the reservoir-foundation interaction is approximately accounted for with an absorbing boundary condition. If a dam has vertical upstream face and the infinitely long reservoir maintains constant depth, then the proposed transmitting boundary can be directly coupled with the model of dam body. In present study, the dam body is assumed to behave elastically and modeled by finite element method. Seismic responses of a dam model are investigated using the newly developed transmitting boundary.