Purpose: The WFIPS system is intended to conduct risk-based analysis of fire management activities and wildfire outcomes for alternative investments in Preparedness, Hazardous Fuels, and Large Fire Suppression. Analysis occurs at user-specified scales from local (i.e. District, National Forests) to Regional and National for all lands and all agencies (provided resources are identified). The risk-basis for WFIPS means that it will be capable of performing multiple annual scenarios (e.g. 50 or 100 or more) to encompass the effects of variation among fire seasons on fire management performance metrics. Ranges of preparedness resources and fuel treatment can be specified and large fire outcomes evaluated (sizes, costs, impacts to population).
Background: The WFIPS approach is a direct descendant of FPA. WFIPS incorporates the major components of FPA in a new framework that runs on large parallel computers under the Windows OS. Because of the large databases supplied with the program, a cloud-based computing approach has been explored so that users access the program and data with minimal installation on local computers and results of analyses can be stored and summarized. The components of WFIPS include:
Status: The WFIPS program is scheduled for testing by select fire planner user groups by March 2017 for regional and national-scale analysis. User-interface features allow for changing the number of firefighting resources by location. In addition, the following functions exist:
For additional online publications please reference our alternative publications sites. |