A front data assimilation system named FIREFLY has been developed at CERFACS in collaboration with the University of Maryland to better estimate the environmental conditions (biomass properties, near-surface wind). We discuss the sequential application of the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) in FIREFLY for correcting in a spatially-distributed way, input parameters in order to better track the fire front position. In particular, using a polynomial chaos surrogate to mimic the wildfire spread model in the EnKF...