Thermal infrared data become more popular in remote sensing investigation, for it could be acquired both in day and night. The change of temperature has special characteristic in natural environment, so the thermal infrared images could be used in monitoring volcanic landform, the urban development, and disaster prevention.<br><br> Heat shadow is formed by reflecting radiating capacity which followed the objects. Because of poor spatial resolution of thermal infrared images in satellite sensor, shadow effects were usually ignored. This research focus on discussing the shadow effects of various features, which include metals and nonmetallic materials.<br><br> An area-based thermal sensor, FLIR-T360 was selected to acquire thermal images. Various features with different emissivity were chosen as reflective surface to obtain thermal shadow in normal atmospheric temperature. Experiments found that the shadow effects depend on the distance between sensors and features, depression angle, object temperature and emissivity of reflective surface. The causes of shadow effects have been altered in the experiment for analyzing the variance in thermal infrared images.<br><br> The result shows that there were quite different impacts by shadow effects between metals and nonmetallic materials. The further research would be produced a math model to describe the shadow effects of different features in the future work.