In this paper a methodology for obtaining the crop temperature from NOAA-9 AVHRR data has been developed, which is based on a theoretical model that permits interpreting the remote sensing temperature measurement in heterogeneous and rough surfaces. This procedure determines the crop temperature by evaluating prsviously: (1) the temperature difference between crop and ground, (2) the atmospheric and emissivity corrections, (3) the ground and vegetation emissi-vities in the AVHRR bands 4 (10-3-11-3 μm) and 5 (11 -5-12-5 μm), and (4) the proportion of ground in each pixel. We have applied this method to obtain a map of orange-tree temperatures for the Valencian region and satisfactory results have been obtained.