The assessment of vegetation dynamics from satellite-derived data becomes more important to the study of land surface.As arid and cold regions play a significant role in China

the importance of the study on these areas has been rec- ognized in both scientific literature and popular media especially in the last few years.These days

some researches indica- ted a strong signal of climatic shift from warm-dry to warm-humid pattern appearing in the last few years.It is known that climate variability has a large impact on the vegetation dynamics.Thus

the research on vegetation cover change and its relationship with climate in Chinese arid and cold regions have become a focus in Chinese geographic study.Since few re- searchers did a systemic research on this area

the study on vegetation cover change and its response to climate in Chinese arid and cold regions become indispensable.This research defined Chinese arid and cold regions by GIS spatial analysis for the first time

then investigated dynamic patterns of vegetation change and its relationship with climate based on analysis of time series Normalized Difference Vegetation Index（NDVI）and meteorological data for the period of 1982-2003. To define Chinese arid and cold regions respectively

temperature and precipitation data sets for the period 1970- 2000 provided by National Meteorological Information Centre are employed.The following 3 conditions of temperature are used as the sign to identify the cold regions:1.the mean air temperature of the coldest month should be lower than -3.0℃;2.less than 5 months with a mean air temperature higher than 10.0℃;3.a yearly averaged temperature not higher than 5.0℃.The yearly precipitation of 250mm and 500mm are used as the threshold values which are employed to classify arid and semi-arid regions. The GIMMS AVHRR NDVI（Normalized Difference Vegetation Index）data sets

a global data set with 8-km resolu- tion（square pixels）developed by the Global Inventory Monitoring and Modeling Studies（GIMMS）group was used in this study.The time-series starts from 1982 to 2003.In order to get the pattern of vegetation cover change

Seasonally Integrat- ed Normalized Difference Vegetation Index（SINDVI）which is defined as the sum of NDVI values for each pixel and all time intervals of maximum value composites（MVC）had been calculated.Linear regression was used to characterize the trends in vegetation cover change.Anomaly analysis was employed to show the yearly average evolution.And SINDVI and yearly meteorological data sets were employed to get the correlation coefficient between SINDVI and yearly mean tempera- ture or precipitation based on correlation analysis.The results suggest that vegetation in more than half part of Chinese arid and cold regions have obviously increased such as Tianshan Mountains

and so on.Vegetation cover change in Chinese ar- id and cold regions has a positive relationship with yearly averaged temperature.In most arid regions SINDVI has a positive relationship with yearly mean precipitation.But the correlation coefficient is negative in some cold regions such as Greater Khingan Range

Lesser Khingan Range and Changbai Mountains.