Particle filters (PFs) are widely used for nonlinear signal processing in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, the measurement uncertainty makes the WSN observations unreliable to the actual case and also degrades the estimation accuracy of the PFs. In addition to the algorithm design, few works focus on improving the likelihood calculation method, since it can be pre-assumed by a given distribution model. In this paper, we propose a novel PF method, which is based on a new likelihood fusion method for WSNs and can further improve the estimation performance. We firstly use a dynamic Gaussian model to describe the nonparametric features of the measurement uncertainty. Then, we propose a likelihood adaptation method that employs the prior information and a belief factor to reduce the measurement noise. The optimal belief factor is attained by deriving the minimum Kullback-Leibler divergence. The likelihood adaptation method can be integrated into any PFs, and we use our method to develop three versions of adaptive PFs for a target tracking system using wireless sensor network. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate that our likelihood adaptation method has greatly improved the estimation performance of PFs in a high noise environment. In addition, the adaptive PFs are highly adaptable to the environment without imposing computational complexity.