Soil survey in arid lands with Enhanced Thematic Mapper data and GIS (Case study: kashan) Matinfar H. A. University of Tehran, Iran Email: matinfar@ut.ac.ir, rezamatinfar@yahoo.com Alavi panah S. K. Associated Professor, Department of Cartography, Soil is an essential part of any terrestrial ecosystem. Scientists, technicians and farmers have studied its physical and chemical properties for many years for agriculture and soil conservation. These studies usually require field sampling and laboratory analysis that are time-consuming and destructive to the samples being analyzed. Remotely sensed data are an alternative because they provide repeated cover, broad information, and high electromagnetic spectral resolution and software-hardware compatibilities. The objective of this study is to evaluate the usefulness of ETM+ data to classify soils and to interpret soil surface conditions in the kashan area. Field observations, soil maps, and salinity maps, topographic maps and result of soil physiochemical analysis use as ancillary data to classify remotely sensed data. The agreement of ETM+ data and soil map was tested using error matrix approach in supervised classification. Based on the results obtained from remotely sensed data we concluded that TTM+ data are a useful for detecting different soil types in arid environments.