Methods and systems of sensing conditions in a fiber includes launching a light beam into a fiber. A first branch of scattered light is set to a mode other than a fundamental mode. A second branch of scattered light is optically filtered to remove unscattered input light. Brillouin scattered light is coherently detected on the first branch to produce a combined temperature/strain profile of the fiber. Raman scattered light on the second branch is directly detected to produce a temperature profile of the fiber. A strain profile of the fiber is determined, using a processor, based on the combined temperature/strain profile and the temperature profile.