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Water pipelines are the efficient and reliable way for water transportation. Leakage of pipelines can lead to tremendous waste of water resources and large economic loss. In this paper, a novel leakage detection method was proposed based on active thermometry and fiber Bragg grating (FBG) based quasi-distributed fiber optic temperature sensing. In this method, the thermal sensing cable was fabricated by coupling heating cable with quasi-distributed temperature sensors. The heat was introduced by the heating cable and the temperature response was measured by the quasi-distributed fiber optic temperature sensor concurrently. The leakage can be detected and located by identifying the local low values in the temperature profile along the pipelines. The feasibility of the proposed method was validated by finite element simulation and experimental investigation. Good agreement between simulation and experimental study was achieved. The results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method for leakage detection.