In recent years the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has designed a new AVHRR-based Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) that has showed to be useful for drought detection and tracking. Validations showed that the VCI has excellent ability to detect drought and to measure time of its onset, intensity, duration, and impact on vegetation. The VCI provides accurate drought information not only for well-defined, prolonged, widespread, and intensive droughts, but also for very localized, short-term, and non well-defined droughts. In addition to the VCI, the AVHRR-based observations in thermal bands were used to develop the Temperature Condition Index (TCI). This index was used to determine temperature-related vegetation stress and also stress caused by an excessive wetness. This paper provides principles of these indices, describes data processing, and gives examples of VCI/TCI application in different ecological environments of the United States.