Abstract: The southern coastal area of Zhejiang Province is one of the popular areas with frequent red tide disa sters. In this paper, the growth and dissipation characteristics of mixed dinoflagellate red tide in the sea area near Dongtou and Nanji Islands in May 2016 were studied by field investigation and using the satellite Aqua data from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro Radiometer (MODIS). The results of field investigation showed that the densities of the first dominant species Prorocentrum donghaiense were higher than 1.0×10⁷ cells/m³ and of Noctiluca scintillansby net sample were higher than 1.0×10⁵ cells/m³, the dominance indexes were 0.82 and 0.34, and the frequencies of occurrence were 82.46% and 98.25%, respectively. The occurrence of P. donghaiense bloom could be divided into growth, maintenance and dissipation phases based on the cell abundance. However, the density variations of cell densities of N. scintillans in the whole day was relatively small, and thus it was difficult to distinguished the phases of this bloom. Furthermore, based on MODIS images, according to the red tide index (RI>2.8) and the classification of the different waters (clean water, TSM water, mixed water,P. donghaiensis bloom water, and diatom bloom water), we can better understand the bloom occurrence from a larger space-time scale. This P. donghaiensedominated bloom started from the northeast of Dongtou Islands, combined with the field survey data on May 13, it was found that the bloom peak appeared in the sea area between Dongtou and Nanji Islands, and then gradually developed to the southwest coastal area. Therefore, the combination of field investigation and satellite remote sensing can provide more scientific and reasonable results for red tide monitoring.