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We report the influence of absorption line selection on the tomographic results for high-temperature flames by numerical and experimental methods. Different combinations of infrared H2O absorption transitions are utilized with the Tikhonov-regularized Abel inversion to reconstruct the radial distribution of temperature and H2O concentration in a flat flame. It is shown that besides using the mathematical algorithm such as regularization, selecting a line pair with a large Δ E″ (>1390 cm−1) also reduces the reconstruction uncertainty at 300–2000 K. In this study, a proper selection of absorption line pairs reduces the reconstruction uncertainty by 25% at the same level of noise. The line pair of H2O transitions at 4029.524 cm−1 and 4030.729 cm−1 is recommended for the tomography of high-temperature flames at 1000–3000 K, whereas the line pair of 7185.597 cm−1 and 7444.352 cm−1 can be used at 300–1000 K.