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This paper presents a quick and highly efficient method to obtain soil moisture content by remote sensing. This method can obtain the moisture content information of a large area in short time. In order to improve the problem of the low accuracy of the model for monitoring soil moisture when using remote sensing, this papers method is based upon spot data of the soil moisture in the second branch irrigation canal of Baojixia. The data was obtained from October, 2007 to March, 2010. After determining the normalization for bands TM5, TM6 and TM7 of Landsat TM, a normalized soil moisture index was obtained, namely NDSMI= (TM5 -TM7+TM6)/ (TM5 +TM7+TM6). Then a monitoring model for remote sensing and soil moisture was created by using difference values between the normalized difference soil moisture index and a reference normalized soil moisture index. The research took a quantitative inversion of soil moisture based on an established model and remote sensing image as a sample on June 28, 2010 of second branch irrigation canal of Baojixia and Famen irrigation area. The results show that inversion accuracy reaches over 80%, and the best depth of soil layer is 0~40 cm layer.