Land surface temperature on alpine mountainous cold regions, which is one of basic parameters of the regional hydrological and meteorological conditions, directly affects glacial recession, snow melt, distribution and freezingthawing process of permafrost, evapotranspiration, vegetation growth, and various underlying surface change process, and then changes the regional hydrological and ecological environment, becomes the important parameter of the research on land surface process and the study of eco-hydrological process. This paper tried to provide an overview of research on land surface temperature, and to introduce its influence factors and the ways to obtain land surface temperature data in high mountainous cold region. Relative to low elevation plain, the land surface temperature was significantly affected by local altitude, terrain and plant cover. There were some methods to obtain land surface temperature, such as measurement in situ, retrieval based on remote sensing and calculation by land surface process models, but there were some limitations while used on alpine mountainous cold regions. Land surface temperature data from meteorological stations were only about level bare ground, and the influence of terrain or vegetable cover was not considered. Therefore, the data could not represent the information of region scale on mountainous area. Land surface temperature retrieval from remote sensing data, because of calculation theory, ground observation verification and spatiotemporal resolution, made it difficult to fulfill research on hydrology, land surface process and eco-hydrological process in alpine mountainous area. Land surface process models estimated land surface temperature in the experimental sites with high accuracy, but reduced the accuracy while upscale to the region scale on the mountainous cold area, because of the error from input control meteorological, soil and plant variables, and the error of ground observation site verification. The future research on land surface temperature on alpine mountainous cold regions should strengthen field observations and improve data accuracy, to build a physical land surface temperature estimation method with topographic and vegetation parameters, and to contribute to research on land-atmosphere-water process in alpine mountainous regions.