Two global optimization methods, the SCE-UA method and the Annealing-simplex (A-S) method for calibrating a daily rainfall-runoff model, a Tank model, was compared with that of the Downhill Simplex method. The performance of the four objective functions, DRMS (daily root mean square), HMLE (heteroscedastic maximum likelihood estimator), ABSERR (mean absolute error), and NS (Nash-Sutcliffe measure), was tested and synthetic data and historical data were used. In synthetic data study. 100% success rates for all objective functions were obtained from the A-S method, and the SCE-UA method was also consistently able to obtain good estimates. The downhill simplex method was unable to escape from local optimum, the worst among the methods, and converged to the true values only when the initial guess was close to the true values. In the historical data study, the A-S method and the SCE-UA method showed consistently good results regardless of objective function. An objective function was developed with combination of DRMS and NS, which putted more weight on the low flows.