Fine-scale weather data are becoming increasing available for fire weather and fire danger forecasting to support tactical fire preparedness and prescribed fire planning. Unfortunately, appropriate techniques to implement the National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) with short-range predictions of fine-scale weather do not exist. Also, little is known about how accurate fine-scale models are compared to coarser-scale products. We propose to I) integrate NFDRS with fine-scale, numerical weather predictions (MM5) and test it in operational environments as a tool for anticipating wildfire danger and potential prescribed-fire opportunities and 2) use a case study of the 2000 fire season to identify appropriate spatial scales for fire danger assessments and predictions. This work supports regional modeling programs being developed under the 2000 Fire Plan (PNW-3, PSW-440l-1, NC-l,4, SRS-4104-l) and complements 2001 JFSP proposals to analyze and predict fire climate (Hostetler, Roads, Brown), develop an automated fire preparedness resource allocation system (Day), and apply a dry lightning algorithm to grid-point weather data (Rorig).