Central Yunnan, constantly in a state of water shortage, is a region of fragile ecological environment whose regional agricultural production and economic development are seriously restricted by drought, despite its relatively developed social economy and dense population. In order to study the drought situation in this area, Landsat TM\OLI remote sensing image data of the region in 2008, 2011, 2014, and 2017 was selected for the construction of the NDVI-LST characteristic space temperature vegetation drought index (TVDI) using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and the land surface temperature (LST). The validity of TVDI was verified by Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) and Potential Evapotranspiration (PET), and the TVDI calculation results were divided into 5 drought levels: wet, normal, moderately dry, dry and severe dry. It is shown that: (1) The TVDI values of different land use types have obvious changes and good applicability; (2) TVDI can effectively reflect the characteristics of drought and spatial-temporal changes in central Yunnan, and the severe drought is mostly distributed in the west and southwest; (3) In the past 10 years, the dynamics of drought in this area have changed significantly, mainly from drought to slight drought, and the overall drought has decreased with time. It is concluded that TVDI model accurately reflected the drought situation in central Yunnan and thus is an instructive tool for regional drought monitoring.