 Remote sensing offers several advantages over traditional methods of land surface water mapping. It is cost-effective, reliable, and capable of making frequent and repeatable observations. Additionally, normalized difference water indexes, NDWIs, calculated from various band combinations, green, near-infrared, NIR, or short-wave infrared, SWIR, have been successfully applied to LSW mapping. Furthermore, new NDWIs will become available when advanced land imager, ALI, data are used since the ALI sensor provides one green band, band four, two NIR bands, band six and seven, and three SWIR bands, bands eight, nine, and ten. As such, selecting the optimal band or combination of bands is critical when ALI data are employed to map LSW using NDWI. To determine which NDWI model performs best, 11 NDWI models based on ALI, thematic mapper, TM, and enhanced thematic mapper plus, ETM plus, data were compared at three different study sites in the Yangtze River Basin, China. The contrast method, AUTSU method, and confusion matrix were calculated. This article was authored by Binyu Sun, Yuen Miao Guo, Hailei Wang, and others.