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Increasing spatial and temporal resolution of numerical models continues to propel progress in hydrological sciences, but, at the same time, it has strained the ability of modern automatic calibration methods to produce realistic model parameter combinations for these models. This paper presents a new reliable and fast automatic calibration framework to address this issue. In essence, the proposed framework, adopting a divide and conquer strategy, first partitions the parameters into groups of different resolutions based on their sensitivity or importance, in which the most sensitive parameters are prioritized with highest resolution in parameter search space, while the least sensitive ones are explored with the coarsest resolution at beginning. This is followed by an optimization based iterative calibration procedure consisting of a series of sub-tasks or runs. Between consecutive runs, the setup configuration is heterogeneous with parameter search ranges and resolutions varying among groups. At the completion of each sub-task, the parameter ranges within each group are systematically refined from their previously estimated ranges which are initially based on a priori information. Parameters attain stable convergence progressively with each run. A comparison of this new calibration framework with a traditional optimization-based approach was performed using a quasi-synthetic double-model setup experiment to calibrate 134 parameters and two well-known distributed hydrological models: the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model and the Distributed Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model (DHSVM). The results demonstrate statistically that the proposed framework can better mitigate equifinality problem, yields more realistic model parameter estimates, and is computationally more efficient.