Land managers are increasingly implementing strategies that employ the use of fire in prescribed burns to sustain ecosystems and plan to sustain the rate of increase in its use over the next five years. In planning and executing expanded use of fire in wildland treatment, it is important to estimate the human health and safety consequences, property damage, and the extent of visibility degradation from the resulting conflagration-pyrolysis generated gases, soot and smoke during flaming, smoldering and/or glowing fires. Traditional approaches have often employed the analysis of weather observations and forecasts to determine whether a prescribed burn will affect populations, property, or protected Class I areas. However, the complexity of the problem lends itself to advanced PC based models that are simple to use for both calculating the emissions from the burning of wildland fuels and the downwind dispersion of smoke and other products of pyrolysis, distillation and/or fuels combustion. These models will need to address the effects of residual smoldering combustion, including plume dynamics and optical effects. In this paper, we discuss a suite of tools that can be applied for downwind dispersion component problem. These tools include the dispersion models FIREPLUME and SMOKE, together with the meteorological preprocessor SEBMET. © University of Idaho 2000. Abstract reproduced by permission.