To improve water management design, particularly in irrigation areas, it is important to evaluate the baseline state of the water resources, including canal discharge. Salt dilution gauging is a traditional and well-documented technique in this respect. The complete mixing of salt used for dilution gauging is required; this condition is difficult to test or verify and, if not fulfilled, is the largest source of uncertainty in the discharge calculation. In this paper, a geophysical technique (FERT, fast electrical resistivity tomography) is proposed for imaging the distribution of the salt plume used for dilution gauging at every point along a sampling cross section. With this imaging, complete mixing can be verified. If the mixing is not complete, the image created by FERT can also provide a possible guidance for selecting water-sampling locations in the sampling cross section. A water multi-sampling system prototype aimed to potentially take into account concentration variability is also proposed and tested. <br><br> The results reported in the paper show that FERT provides a three-dimensional image of the dissolved salt plume and that this can potentially help in the selection of water sampling points.