Multi-temporal 8-day composite MODIS Surface Reflectance Product of 2009 were used to map the distribution of rice paddy in Henan Province.By taking into consideration the characteristic of rice cultivation and the rice growth patterns,a scheme for rice mapping has been proposed.In this scheme,to reduce the influence of factors like cloud,the time series of land surface water content index(I_LSW) and enhanced vegetation index(I_EV) were calculated from MODIS imagery and two different filters were applied to rebuild the time series data.Then,the principal component analysis method was employed to reduce the dimensionality of the times series data,with the first three components as I_LSW and I_EV respectively reserved as feature bands.Another feature band is the rice similarity index,which was obtained by calculating the similarity index between a standard rice growth curve of I_EV and the temporal curve of I_EV for each pixel.However,there were obvious differences in rice phenology between the north and south rice planting regions in Henan Province.Based on the obtained rice GPS samples,a standard rice growth curve of IEV was established for each region.Finally,support vector machine(SVM) classification method was used to retrieve rice distribution from the feature bands.The results showed that the obtained rice distribution in Henan Province is well consistent with the real situation.Rice mainly distributed on both sides of the Yellow river in the north of Henan Province,while it distributed along the Huaihe River or around large reservoirs in the south of Henan Province.Compared with the statistical data,the rice area obtained from MODIS data bears a mean relative error of 6.56%,and a Root Mean Square Error of 5.63 khm².Because of mixed pixels and dispersed rice distribution in some regions,the relative error can be larger than ±60%.However,the proposed rice mapping scheme based on the temporal MODIS data still shows its advantages in rice distribution mapping for large-scale areas.