Abstract: Drought is a usual natural disaster.Remote sensing has been widely used to monitor the drought.In contrast with immediate satellite images,drought monitoring is always difficult.Thermal inertia and vegetation supply water index approach were widely applied in drought remote sensing monitoring at present,but the results were restricted at a certain extent by external conditions.Based on the land surface temperature-vegetation coverage(T-VC) method,the NOAA/AVHRR data during the first ten days of August 2006 was processed for sieving cloud to establish T-VC feature space,and equations of drought line and wet line,and to calculate the drought index.Combined with the surface observational data,drought level was determined.The thematic map of the drought remote sensing monitoring was mapped by using ENVI 4.0.The results showed that the monitoring consequence of the T-VC almost corresponded to the local observed monitoring results.The method was practical in the drought monitoring routine.

Key words: Drought, Drought, Remote sensing monitoring, Land surface temperature, Vegetation coverage