A modified laboratory installation to generate levitating clusters of droplets above the locally heated water surface is presented. The laser-heated sitall plate with an opaque graphite coating is used as a substrate for the water layer which produces a levitating droplet cluster. The cluster is stabilized with the use of infrared heating as was recently demonstrated by the authors. A combined experimental and computational method is developed to obtain the axisymmetric quasi-steady temperature field in sitall plate and water and also to calculate the radial profile of heat flux at the water surface. Both the temperature and heat flux at the water surface are important boundary conditions for the upcoming computational modeling of cluster formation. The correlations between the laser power, the measured overall flow rate of steam at the water surface, and other important parameters of the problem are also examined. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.