Abstract: Drought stress is an important issue in the agricultural production in central Asia. Selecting the typical MurghabTejen oasis in Turkmenistan as the study area, and by using two MODIS images and the two TM images in the same time, the land surface temperature (LST)/normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) characteristic space was established, and two kinds of temperaturevegetation drought index (TVDI), i.e., TVDI-TM and TVDI-MODIS, were calculated from the LST/NDVI of different sensor images in 2001 and 2011. The Landsat TM data with higher resolution were used to verify the results of the MODIS inversion data. The absolute error of the TVDITM and TVDI-MODIS was 0.0178 and 0.0228, the RMSE was 0.0226 and 0.0279, and the correlation coefficient was 0.949 and 0.922, respectively, indicating that TVDI could effectively reflect regional soil drought conditions. In the oasis, arid region occupied more than 60% of the total, and drought was becoming more serious from the center to the outer oasis. In the past ten years, the area of low soil moisture in the oasis presented an expanding trend, the mist and normal moisture area decreased by 5.32%, and the drought and severe drought area increased by 14%. Overall, the drought situation was aggravated. Therefore, using the TVDI of MODIS image could effectively monitor the droughts in central Asia.