The Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model has been running in realtime in several universities and government laboratories, including the NOAA Cooperative Institute for Regional Prediction (CIRP) at the University of Utah. At CIRP, we are running a real-time version of the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model that provides high resolution forecasts at 12.5 km grid spacing for the western United States (http://www.met.utah.edu/jimsteen/wrf/html/wrfFrames.html). WRF is initialized with the ETA 212 grid at 0000 UTC and 1200 UTC each day for a 48-h forecast. CIRP maintains the Mesowest cooperative network (http://www.met.utah.edu/mesowest), which collects surface data from over 3000 stations over the western United States, including Remote Automated Weather Stations (RAWS) that are positioned to support fire-weather monitoring and forecasting. We will verify the 2-m temperature, 2-m relative humidity, and 10-m wind predicted from WRF against the surface observations from Mesowest, using statistical parameters such as threat scores and biases. Factors that contribute to good and poor model forecasts will be evaluated and discussed. Our findings can potentially aid WRF model developers in improving and/or fine-tuning the model physics.