  A wildfire model is formulated based on balance equations for energy and
fuel, where the fuel loss due to combustion corresponds to the fuel reaction
rate. The resulting coupled partial differential equations have coefficients
that can be approximated from prior measurements of wildfires. An ensemble
Kalman filter technique with regularization is then used to assimilate
temperatures measured at selected points into running wildfire simulations. The
assimilation technique is able to modify the simulations to track the
measurements correctly even if the simulations were started with an erroneous
ignition location that is quite far away from the correct one.
