FARSITE is a fire behavior and fire growth simulator that incorporates both spatial and temporal information on topography, fuels, and weather. For more information, look under National Systems in the menu at the top of each page.

The installation program and accompanying files can be found on the Downloads page.

FARSITE is a fire growth simulation modeling system. It uses spatial information on topography and fuels along with weather and wind files. It incorporates existing models for surface fire, crown fire, spotting, post-frontal combustion, and fire acceleration into a 2-dimensional fire growth model.

FARSITE is widely used by the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, and other federal and state land management agencies to simulate the spread of wildfires and fire use for resource benefit across the landscape. It is designed for users familiar with fuels, weather, topography, wildfire situations and the associated terminology. Because of its complexity, only users with the proper fire behavior training and experience should use FARSITE where the outputs are to be used for making fire and land management decisions.

• Landscape (.LCP) file,
• Initial Fuel Moistures (.FMS) file,
• optional Custom Fuel Model (.FMD) files,
• optional Conversion (.CNV) files,
• optional Weather (.WTR) files, and
• optional Wind (.WND) files.

• Rothermel's (1972) surface fire spread model,
• Van Wagner's (1977) crown fire initiation model,
• Rothermel's (1991) crown fire spread model, and
• Nelson's (2000) dead fuel moisture model.

FARSITE runs under Microsoft^® Windows operating systems and features a graphical user interface. Users must have the support of a geographic information system (GIS) to use FARSITE because it requires spatial coincident landscape raster information to run.