| Summary: | FireFamily Plus is the new software for summarizing and analyzing daily weather observations and computing fire danger indexes 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 critical 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 flexible analysis environment, including station grouping, variable period groups (daily, weekly, and so forth), and modification of station metadata. FireFamily Plus will generate Pocket Cards for Firefighter Safety and supports the climatological data requirements of Fire Behavior Analysts making long-range fire growth assessments using Rerap and fire growth projections using Farsite.
This user's guide provides detail on obtaining historical fire weather and occurrence data, importing those data into FireFamily Plus, and working with the analysis capabilities of the program.
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