Water jet impingement cooling is used to remove heat from high-temperature surfaces such as hot steel plates in the steel manufacturing process (thermo-mechanical cooling process; TMCP). In those processes, uniform cooling is the most critical factor to ensure high strength steel and good quality. In this study, experiments are performed to measure the heat transfer coefficient together with the inverse heat conduction problem (IHCP) analysis for a plate cooled by planar water jet. In the inverse heat transfer analysis, spatial and temporal variations of heat transfer coefficient, with no information regarding its functional form, are determined by employing the conjugate gradient method with an adjoint problem. To estimate the two dimensional distribution of heat transfer coefficient and heat flux for planar waterjet cooling, eight thermo-couple are installed inside the plate. The results show that heat transfer coefficient is approximately uniform in the span-wise direction in the early stage of cooling. In the later stage where the forced-convection effect is important, the heat transfer coefficient becomes larger in the edge region. The surface temperature vs. heat flux characteristics are also investigated for the entire boiling regimes. In addition, the heat transfer rate for the two different plate geometries are compared at the same Reynolds number.