Question - Why do we use models if they are wrong??

Answer

1. Becuase they get you to think by asking you about the variables that are important.
2. They provide consistent answers that have overtime created their own meaning (even if that meaning is different than reality). 
3. Model outputs are more legally sound than the argument "I just know that is how the fire is going to behave".

Fire Family Plus

How-to: use Fire Family Plus
"FireFamily+ (FF+) is a software package used to calculate fuel moistures and indices from the US National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) using hourly or daily fire weather observations primarily from Remote Automated Weather Stations (RAWS)." it is available for free from FireLab.org. 

IFTDSS

The Interagency Fuel Treatment Decision Support System is a rapidly expanding program. Some of the main features include create landscape summaries, fire behavior summaries, burn probability, and fuel treatment modeling.  It is a very useful tool for assessing and manipulating LANDFIRE data. 

FlamMap - Coming soon