Abstract: Quickly and accurately identifying the spatial distribution and evolution of heat sources in industrial enterprises can help reveal the changing laws of industrial geographic locations and pollution sources, and is of great significance to industrial layout adjustment, green development, and environmental pollution supervision. Considering that the Yangtze River Delta region of Jiangsu is an important industrial zone in the Yangtze River Delta and an important industrial belt in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, this paper uses the unique properties of industrial thermal anomalies in space and time, and combines the 2012-2020 NPP-VIIRS satellite long-term sequence segment. Using the fixed threshold method to identify and extract thermal anomalous points, the location distribution and changing laws of industrial heat source thermal anomalies in the Jiangsu area along the river were studied to reveal the temporal and spatial pattern of the development of industrial enterprises in the area along the Jiangsu River. Main conclusions: (1) By using the thermal anomaly point data of the NPP satellite VIIRS sensor, the location identification and spatial evolution analysis of industrial heat sources along the Yangtze River in Jiangsu from 2012 to 2020 were carried out. The number of industrial thermal anomalies generally shows a trend of first decreasing and then increasing. In 2020, there will be a sharp decrease, and at the same time, there will be a distribution pattern of “more in the south and less in the north”. (2) From 2012 to 2020, the FRP of the radiation intensity of industrial thermal anomalies generally showed a “U”-shaped change trend, and suddenly decreased sharply in 2020. Among them, the FRP values of Nanjing, Changzhou and Suzhou have been in the top three and all are greater than 1 000 MW, which is consistent with the trend of changes in the output statistics of industrial enterprises along the Yangtze River in Jiangsu. (3) In 2012, 2016 and 2019, the high-density nuclei of industrial thermal anomalies were mainly distributed along the Yangtze River, and the number and location were relatively stable. The overall density core points show a trend of shifting from upstream to downstream, of which Yangzhou and Nantong are the two representative cities with significant changes.