The approach for the present work is to develop a one-dimensional heat conduction model to infer the surface heating rates from the temperature data. The temperature history is obtained from a nickel thin film sensor mounted on a quartz substrate during a supersonic flight test. Polynomial curve fitting with regression analysis and cubic spline methods are used to fit the temperature data. One-dimensional numerical schemes are developed to infer surface heating rates by using Duhamel's superposition integral. Since the temperature data are acquired for 10 s, the one-dimensional behavior of heat penetration might not be applicable for entire time scale. In order to include the lateral conduction of heat along the depth of substrate, finite-element analysis of a more realistic gauge-substrate system is carried out with commercial package ANSYS 11. With the inputs of surface heating rates predicted from Duhamel's superposition integral, the temperature history are then recovered at various depths of the substrate and on the surface. The surface temperature history recovered from FE analysis compares well with experimental temperature history up to a time scale of 4 s. Also, numerical results for the representative problems show that the surface heat flux can be predicted well by the cubic spline method.