The accurate monitoring of battery cell temperature is indispensible to the design of battery thermal management system. To obtain the internal temperature of a battery cell online, an adaptive temperature estimation method based on Kalman filtering and an equivalent time-variant electrical network thermal (EENT) model is proposed. The EENT model uses electrical components to simulate the battery thermodynamics, and the model parameters are obtained with a least square algorithm. With a discrete state-space description of the EENT model, a Kalman filtering (KF) based internal temperature estimator is developed. Moreover, considering the possible time-varying external heat exchange coefficient, a joint Kalman filtering (JKF) based estimator is designed to simultaneously estimate the internal temperature and the external thermal resistance. Several experiments using the hard-cased LiFePO4 cells with embedded temperature sensors have been conducted to validate the proposed method. Validation results show that, the EENT model expresses the battery thermodynamics well, the KF based temperature estimator tracks the real central temperature accurately even with a poor initialization, and the JKF based estimator can simultaneously estimate both central temperature and external thermal resistance precisely. The maximum estimation errors of the KF- and JKF-based estimators are less than 1.8 °C and 1 °C respectively.