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This project addresses the Disasters and Ecological Forecasting Applied Sciences Application themes, the priority topics of fire risk assessment and responding to fires. The project will incorporate coupled atmosphere-wildfire forecasting of wildland fire behavior into NOAA and USFS fire weather systems. It will be available in the NOAA FX-Net client for selected areas, such as major existing fires, and on demand for incident support, research, and training. The products will include forecasts of fine-resolution fire danger information, such as forecast maps of wildfire spread and the intensity of a potential fire, thus complementing existing decision support systems. This project proposes to continue to develop and maintain the fire behavior module SFIRE that is coupled with the community mesoscale Weather Research Forecasting (WRF) model. A version of SFIRE is distributed with WRF as WRF-Fire. The project will couple WRF and SFIRE with data from NASA and NOAA satellites and atmospheric and GIS data available online, to provide significantly enhanced fire weather as well as wildland fire behavior forecasts. The final goal is implementation of WRF-SFIRE as an operational forecast tool with capabilities for decision making for the USFS Wildland Fire Decision Support System and fire managers in urban communities. The immediate application will be for planning prescribed burns. In the future, use will extend to now-casting of existing wildland fires as more experience with the tool is gained and more resources come online. Stage I of the project will consist of building a limited prototype forecast system and assessing if the required simulation capability and real-time data sources exist and if the project has the potential to provide improvement or new information compared with existing fire forecasting information. Computing requirements will be estimated, an organizational scheme for provisioning them will be developed, and a roadmap will be established for future enhancements.