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The Inner Mongolia grassland of China is representative of semi-arid grasslands in temperate zones. Studying land surface processes in this region will improve the understanding of regional climate formation and the feedback with global climate change. Satellite remote sensing provides an excellent opportunity to study land-atmosphere interactions at the regional scale. It is necessary to develop feasible and reasonable remote sensing-based methods to map surface energy fluxes for a specific study area. In this paper, previously published algorithms and empirical formulae were tested with Landsat 7 ETM+ data to derive the regional distributions of land surface reflectance, surface temperature, NDVI and land surface energy fluxes (net radiation, soil heat flux, sensible heat flux and latent heat flux) over the upper Xilin River watershed in Inner Mongolia, China. A new land use/land cover classification was developed and applied for regionalization analysis. Validation of remote sensing derived surface reflectance, surface temperature, net radiation and sensible heat flux with field measurements shows differences of about 13, 4, 1, and 28%, respectively. This study provides valuable guidance for further investigation of the whole watershed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]