A combined approach has been employed to characterize the flow field and local heat transfer in jet impingement configurations, featuring a mass transfer experiment and a digital visualization technique. A jet velocity range is spanned to ensure flow regime transition. The well-known heat/mass transfer analogy has been used to infer on the local heat exchange on a infinite plate. In this experiment, a naphthalene film is ablated from a disk, due to jet exposure. Automated contact measurements of the variation of film depth in the stagnation region and beyond have been performed. From the local naphthalene loss rate the local heat transfer is then inferred. Coherent structures are created both at the interface between free jet and quiescent medium and upon impingement at plate, and need to be visualized in the vicinity of stagnation. To this end a particle image velocimetry system is exploited to extract the two components velocity instantaneous information. Ablation measurements confirm the non-monotonic progress of local heat transfer for small nozzle-to-plate spacings. The visualizations evidence that local heat transfer is strongly influenced by impingement structures: the maximum heat transfer coefficient offset,which can be detected is due, even for laminar or transitional jet, to large-scale toroidal vortices impacting on the plate. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.