Taegu is notorious as hot and dry summer among Korea cities. One of the most important goals of the open space planning is to ameliorate urban climate of the city. The objective of this research is to evaluate the thermal mitigation effect of the cool islands in Taegu metropolitan city. Cool islands of this paper includes parks and rivers surrounded by or adjacent to urbanized areas. Based on the analysis of the thermal band of Landsat TM at May 17, 1997, the thermal mitigation effect of open spaces in the city could be summarized as follows ; Kumho river showed the largest mitigation effect in terms of the width of mitigation zone and temperature difference. Evaporation from wide water surface and evapo-transpiration from riparian grass land could bring into results. Significant mitigation effect of parks covered with forest can be observed. The temperature range of such parks were between 19.05$^{circ}C$ and 19.44$^{circ}C$ However, the thermal mitigation effect of Dalsung park and Apsan park was insignificant. The small size and high percentage of hard paving of the former and the relative low density of the residential areas adjacent to the latter could be the main reason. In conclusion, the thermal mitigation effect in urban ope spaces could be detectedby the employment of thermal band data of Landsat TM and GIS buffering technique.