Abstract: The influence of model surface roughness on wind-induced response and interference of cooling tower were investigated based on aero-elastic model. Similarity relations for cooling tower aero-elastic model were proposed, according to it an aero-elastic model with geometrical scale of 1:400 was successfully designed and processed for a 200m high cooling tower of a nuclear power plant. Wind tunnel test were carried out to measure wind-induced response of tower with three types of roughness in the simulated wind field of terrain category B. The result of this study showed that the propoced aero-elastic model could be used to simulate the similarity relation of mass, stiffness and damping of prototype cooling tower accurately. Meanwhile, it was found that the max mean square deviation of displacement decreases with increasing roughness, and also was the mean value within the range of a certain roughness. However, when roughness exceedes a critical value, the mean response increasing with the increasing of the roughness. In addition, roughness had shown nearly no influence on the auto-power spectral density of displacement, gust response factor and interference factor.