Winter wheat is one of the main crops in China. Mapping the winter wheat growing areas with remote sensing technology is one of key areas of remote sensing application. The FY-3 series polar orbiting satellites launched since 2008 were equipped a Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer（ MERSI） which has five 250 m resolution channels

ranging from visible

near infrared to thermal band. The data may capture abundant land surface information and is a new data source for mapping winter wheat growing areas. We selected eight date MERSI data with high quality in the early stage of the winter wheat growing season. We adopted the hierarchical classification method to extract winter wheat area. For each class

we chose the most sensitive band or band composites to build the decision tree which is helpful to separate the classes on an image. After winter wheat area was extracted from all images

a data fusion process was followed. Finally

the winter wheat planting area map was made available. In comparison with the ground truth data

the winter wheat planting area map obtained a relative accuracy of 90. 8%. The results showed that in early stage of the spring

mapping the winter wheat planting area with FY-3 MERSI data is feasible and it is also able to provide timely winter wheat planting area information for the agricultural management.