The effects of oxygen ambiance on electrical characteristic degradation phenomena in a-InGaZnO thin film transistor with different biases and temperatures are investigated. It can be found that oxygen is substantially adsorbed on the backchannel and results in device instabilities during positive gate bias stress. However, visible light irradiation is found to desorb the adsorbed oxygen ions and this verifies that oxygen dominates the degradation behavior. Moreover, comparing with that in vacuum, hot-carrier stress in oxygen ambiance leads to an extra potential barrier height near the drain side due to oxygen adsorption and causes asymmetric degradation. Furthermore, the asymmetric degradation behavior after hot-carrier stress in oxygen ambiance is suppressed at high temperature due to temperature-induced oxygen desorption or heat-induced holes injecting into the gate insulator. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.