Abstract: Abstract: In recent years droughts occurred frequently in western, southwestern remote mountainous areas of China, affecting the local agricultural production and farmers' life. Drought monitoring and prediction is one of the main tasks of crop condition monitoring. Remote sensing data and ground survey data are used to monitor drought in current crop condition monitoring system, while high-resolution Remote sensing data and enough ground survey data for effective monitoring are often unable to access timely in those remote mountainous areas due to complex topography and broken plots. The aim of the study was to develop drought monitoring method to meet the complex terrain area and then to provide reliable scientific information to guide agricultural production. Crop water deficit index (CWDI) as an index characterizing agricultural drought has been widely used, which includes parameters of potential evapotranspiration (PET) and precipitation. Soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) as a distributed hydrological model with strong mechanism has been used to simulate crop's potential evapotranspiration in those areas with complex topography. Those tools provide a feasible way of this study. The upper and middle reaches of Qingjiang River Basin, as the study area, from which drought conditions were monitored by the combination of CWDI and SWAT. Land use/cover data, soil data, topography data, meteorology data and hydrological data from 2003 to 2005 and 2007 to 2010 were used for calibration and validation of SWAT model. The PET simulated by SWAT had a high correlation fit with the PET calculated with meteorological data. Comparison of the statistical indexes included relative bias, root mean square error and multiple correlation coefficients. Standard precipitation index (SPI) was used for two times of drought monitoring tests to compare with the crop water deficit index (CWDI) based on the SWAT model. In July 2009, heavy drought happened in upper and middle reaches of Qingjiang River Basin. From the result of SPI, most part of the area had severe drought including Lichuan, Jianshi and Hefeng. Based on statistics of GIS software, severe drought area was about 86,830 ha. There was a different range of severe drought in Lichuan, Enshi, Jianshi, Badong and Xuanen from the result of CWDI. The area of severe drought was 23,059 ha. However, based on the regional survey, due to continuous high temperatures and less precipitation, crop growth was affected and about 25,440 ha of farmland was heavily affected. In April 2010, light drought was taken place in upper and middle reaches of Qingjiang River Basin. From the result of SPI, only mild drought happened in Enshi, Badong and Jianshi and there was no other level of drought for the same time period. The monitoring result of CWDI showed that moderate drought occurred in part of Enshi region and mild drought in north-central of Jianshi, north of Badong. There was about 7,448 ha of moderate drought from the statistical survey result. According to the statistical survey data，the affected area of crop reached 8,000 ha. Compared with the monitoring results of SPI, the disaster degree and scope were closer between CWDI and actual survey results. The difference existed in these two kinds of monitoring results, which mainly because SPI consisted of precipitation without other elements, which can not objectively reflect the degree of water demand of land surface. CWDI was composed by PET and precipitation and PET was a function of many meteorological elements and crop factor, which can reflect different situation under the same precipitation. The results proved that the combination of CWDI and SWAT can reflect the regional drought condition objectively at the period of crop growth in mountainous areas and overcome the limitations of meteorological drought index calculated by few meteorological stations' data.