Drought is one of the major environmental disasters. Weather data, particularity rainfall, are currently the primary source of information widely used for drought monitoring. However, weather data are often from a very sparse meteorological network, incomplete and/or not always available in good time to enable relatively accurate and timely drought detection. Data from remote sensing platforms can be used to complements weather data in drought. Therefore, data obtained from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer(AVHRR) sensor on board the NOAA polar-orbiting satellites have been studied as a tool for drought monitoring. The normalized difference vegetation index(NDVI)-based vegetation condition index(VCI) were used in this study These indices showed their excellent ability to detect vegetation stress due to drought. The results clearly show that temporal and spatial characteristics of drought in Korea can be detected and mapped by the VCI index.