Abstract: Street is an important place for urban residents, and the air quality in streets is closely related to residents’ health. Air pollutant diffusion model is an often used measure to simulate and evaluate air quality in street canyon in recent years, but the problems existing in model application need to be clarified. This review selected four air pollutant diffusion models, i.e., ENVI-met, FLUENT, MISKAM and OSPM, which were most popular in street canyon studies. Through comparisons on the model mechanisms, the operational processes, the temporal-spatial resolutions and so on, their differences in model scopes and modeling capabilities in street canyon air quality simulation were discriminated, the model deficiencies were pointed out according to temporal scale, modeling, weather handling, turbulent simulation and photochemical pollution, and several model optimization measures were suggested in terms of street canyon study. Moreover, through reviewing the case stu-dies of the four models, the shortcomings in model application were concluded, and some new techniques were highlighted for future application studies such as laser radar to improve input data accuracy, and the importance of considering urban heat island and urban pollutant island simultaneously was emphasized in evaluating street environment quality.