Abstract: Soil moisture plays an important role in surface energy balances,regional runoff,potential drought and crop yield etc. Traditional measurement of soil moisture is a time-consuming job and only limited samples could be collected. Many problems would be results from extending those point measurements to 2D space,especially for a regional area with heterogeneous soil characteristics. The emergency of remote-sensing technology makes it possible to rapidly monitor soil moisture on a regional scale. In this paper,research progress in soil moisture and drought monitoring based on satellite remote sensing is briefly introduced first. Then,MODIS vegetation supplication water index(VSWI) at a 1km scale and MODIS band 7 reflectivity at a 0. 5km scale have been combined respectively with ground measured soil moisture to determine regression relationships. The result shows that MODIS VSWI and MODIS band 7 reflectivity are significantly correlated with the ground measured soil moisture during the growing season in the central Tibet and the coefficients of quadratic polynomial regression reach 0. 84 and 0. 88,respectively. Due to strong heterogeneity of soil type and vegetating cover in Tibet,compared to other methods,the cubic polynomial regression model based on reflectivity of MODIS band 7 is more effective way to monitor soil moisture content for non-growing season in whole Tibet area. MODIS band 7 can be used to estimate soil moisture content of non-growing season's agriculture land as well. In a word,MODIS band 7 is a simple and effective soil moisture and drought monitoring approach compared to other remote sensing based methods for the Tibet region.