With the development of urban modernization, urban heat island effect has increasingly intensified its influence on human health, climate, resources and environment, which has become a huge environmental problem facing urban development today. In view of the increasingly obvious urban heat island effect in the urban center, based on Landsat series data and MODIS remote sensing data, this study took the downtown area of Ningbo as the study area, and applied GIS technology and Pearson correlation analysis method to analyze the correlation change between the surface temperature and other factors in the long time series. The results show that from 1990 to 2015, the heat island effect changed significantly in the downtown area of Ningbo. The surface temperature is negatively correlated with NDVI and positively correlated with NDBI. The surface temperature is positively correlated with GDP, reaching its maximum value in 2010. Population size and the gap between rural and urban areas will not directly lead to the urban heat island effect. The study shows that the surface temperature inversion technology based on the single window algorithm analysis the driving factors of urban heat island effect change has certain feasibility. This study can alleviate the planning of Ningbo downtown area benefit of heat island advice, in order to alleviate the regional environmental change.