Description

CFIS (Crown Fire Initiation and Spread) is a new (nonprofit) software system that incorporates several recently developed models designed to simulate crown fire behavior (Alexander and others 2006). The main outputs of CFIS are ability to determine the: 1) likelihood of crown fire initiation or occurrence; 2) type of crown fire (active vs. passive) and its rate-of-spread; and 3) minimum spotting distance required to increase a fire's overall forward rate-of-spread. This new software application can serve as a decision support aid in a wide variety of fire management activities-ranging from near real-time prediction of fire behavior to analyzing the impacts of fuel treatments on potential crown fire behavior.