The atmospheric water vapor column density is retrieved based on near infrared passive differential optical absorption spectroscopy technique(IR-DOAS). The high-resolution cross sections are obtained from the Hirtran database and Voigt profiles are used for linear broadening under different temperature and pressure conditions to obtained different inversion absorption cross section. The spectra with elevation angle of 90° is selected as reference spectra to retrieve H2O column to obtain the vertical column density. Compared with solar photometer(CE-318), it is found that the results are in good trend consistency with IR-DOAS, and the linear correlation coefficient is 0.99. The differences between inversion values of IR-DOAS and CE-318 are within the range of inversion error of IR-DOAS. It is found that the slant column density of water vapor in vertical direction varies gradiently with elevation angle, while the slant column density of water vapor in horizontal direction nearly uniform with observation azimuth, and the distribution is uniform.