  We present an overview of a modeling environment, consisting of a coupled
atmosphere-wildfire model, utilities for visualization, data processing, and
diagnostics, open source software repositories, and a community wiki. The fire
model, called SFIRE, is based on a fire-spread model, implemented by the
level-set method, and it is coupled with the Weather Research Forecasting (WRF)
model. A version with a subset of the features is distributed with WRF 3.3 as
WRF-Fire. In each time step, the fire module takes the wind as input and
returns the latent and sensible heat fluxes. The software architecture uses WRF
parallel infrastructure for massively parallel computing. Recent features of
the code include interpolation from an ideal logarithmic wind profile for
nonhomogeneous fuels and ignition from a fire perimeter with an atmosphere and
fire spin-up. Real runs use online sources for fuel maps, fine-scale
topography, and meteorological data, and can run faster than real time.
Visualization pathways allow generating images and animations in many packages,
including VisTrails, VAPOR, MayaVi, and Paraview, as well as output to Google
Earth. The environment is available from openwfm.org. New diagnostic variables
were added to the code recently, including a new kind of fireline intensity,
which takes into account also the speed of burning, unlike Byram's fireline
intensity.
