Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System
MesoWest's wildland fire services implement the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System (CFFDRS) Fire Weather Indexes (FWIs) to assess the conditions of an environment for the devlopment and spread of wildfire in the northern parts of North America. This system, developed by Canadian scientists throughout the last half of the 20th century, uses basic weather variables and interative daily or hourly calculations to produce contiually varying daily and hourly danger indexes.
There is a second part of the CFFDRS system, known as Fire Behavior Prediction (FBP) which is a series of formulas designed to describe the way a fire that has already ignited will evolve in given environmental conditions and fuel types. The FBP calculations are generally run by trained fire managers who will frequently modify input values for different theoretical conditions, to form a more complete picture of an ongoing wildland fire situation.
To assist in the production and application of the CFFDRS system, we have developed an online version of both the FWI calculations, and the entire FBP system, which are available for use by anyone.
Fire Weather Index Calculator
Compute FWIs for multiple days.
Fire Behavior Prediction Calculator
Diagnose the evolution of an existing fire in a given environment.
Use our JavaScript FWI code
We are happy to share our FWI claculator codes for you to use in your own fire applications. We currently request that you copy the codes to your own project, instead of linking to them directly. Excessive linking may be blocked. These codes have been tested by various memebers of the fire weather community, and have been found to produce accurate results. However, we will make updates in the future.