FireFamily Plus: Fire Weather and Fire Danger Climatology at your Fingertips

FireFamily Plus is the new software for summarizing and analyzing daily weather observations and computing fire danger indices based on the National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS). While the software and packaging are new, many of the reports are not. FireFamily Plus addressed the year 2000 issues that confronted a litany of DOS programs that operated against fire weather files and combined the critically functionality of many of those programs into one 32-bit Windows program.

FireFamily Plus philosophy departs significantly from the traditional way of processing historical NFDRS indexes. Foremost, it has fire occurrence information integrated throughout the program while historically programs have dealt exclusively with weather only. This is accomplished through a fire weather/fire occurrence integrated database. The database approach with computations 'on the fly' allows a very flexible analysis environment, including station grouping, variable period groups (daily, weekly, etc.), and modification of NFDRS station metadata (e.g. fuel model).

This poster paper highlights the program and data structures and illustrates some applications to traditional fire weather climatology applications in both planning and operational (e.g. long range fire potential assessment) applications.