Abstract. In this letter, the localization of coherently distributed (CD) is considered. With regard to the direction finding of CD source, the conventional method distributed source parameter estimation (DSPE) can provide stable estimation performance, while it also requires a complex two-dimensional spectral peak search for both nominal direction-of-arrivals (DOAs) and angular spreads. Thus, with rank reduction criterion, we derived a successive propagator method (S-PM) which exploits three decoupled one-dimensional search to replace an extensive one-dimension search to reduce the heavy cost. And the proposed algorithm can avoid the high-complexity eigen-decomposition procedure by using the linear operator-propagator. When compared to the convention ESPRIT-CD [8], S-PM has a better estimation performance with a low complexity. Several simulation results illustrate the effectiveness and improvements of the proposed algorithm.