This study investigates a nonlinear inverse convection problem for a laminar-forced convective flow between two parallel plates. The upper plate is exposed to unknown heat flux while the lower plate is insulated. The unknown heat flux is determined using temperature measured on the lower plate. The thermophysical properties of the fluid are temperature dependent, which renders the problem nonlinear. The sequential gradient method is applied to this nonlinear inverse problem in order to solve the problem efficiently. The function specification method is incorporated to stabilize the sequential estimation. The corresponding adjoint formalism is provided. Accuracy and stability have been examined for the proposed method with test cases. The tendency of deterministic error is investigated for several parameters. Stable solutions are achieved eve]1 with severely impaired measurement data.