  The FORWARD SolarSoft IDL package is a community resource for model-data
comparison, with a particular emphasis on analyzing coronal magnetic fields.
FORWARD allows the synthesis of coronal polarimetric signals at visible,
infrared, and radio frequencies, and will soon be augmented for ultraviolet
polarimetry. In this paper we focus on observations of the infrared (IR)
forbidden lines of Fe XIII, and describe how FORWARD may be used to directly
access these data from the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory Coronal Multi-channel
Polarimeter (MLSO/CoMP), to put them in the context of other space- and
ground-based observations, and to compare them to synthetic observables
generated from magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) models.
