This paper proposes an effective thermal compact modeling method for a thin film resistor that is dedicated for snubber circuits in power electronic modules. The objective compact model consists of thermal capacitors and thermal resistors. Some of the objective compact models express the effects of local air gaps as well as convective boundary conditions, which are natively non-linear phenomena. To identify their values, we use the surface temperature response of the thin film resistor to the input power. The experimental results show that the derived compact thermal model robustly causes the measured thermal durability to wide input power pulse width variations to reappear.