What does Prometheus do?

• Automatically computes spatially explicit wildfire growth and behaviour for single or multiple ignitions under heterogeneous conditions of topography, fuels and weather.
• Uses the Fire Weather Index (FWI) and Fire Behaviour Prediction (FBP) Sub-Systems of the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System (CFFDRS).
• Uses point, line or polygon ignitions.
• Uses daily or hourly weather.
• As a deterministic model, produces output that is directly related to the input used by the user.
• Produces output that are GIS software compatible.
• Allows users to modify fuel types and weather streams to run and evaluate a variety of scenarios.
• Uses the MS COM interface, thereby allowing easier integration of the model with other MS applications.
• The model can potentially be used to:
  
  • assist in delineating fire management zones, and identifying opportunities for the use of prescribed fire.
  • provide operational fire suppression support by predicting wildfire behaviour during escape fire situations.
  • assist agencies with wildfire training and education by running "re-plays" and "what-if" scenarios.
  • conduct "what-if" scenarios in a planning mode to determine the threat of potential wildfires to values at risk.
  • assess the effectiveness of alternative forest management strategies to mitigate the threat of large wildfires.
  • produce burn probability maps by using the model stochastically.
  • assess the role of fire in establishing and maintaining landscape patterns.
  • assess the return on investment from suppression expenditures.

What's new in Version 5.1.8?

If you are familiar with Version 4.5.1 of Prometheus, click here to view the new features of Version 5.1.8 (Release date: May 26, 2008).

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