The computer program is created to create useful data on the behavior of a prescribed burn. The behavior is calculated by using certain characteristics that are gathered before the prescribed fire is to be lit. Because wildfires are becoming more and more common as the years progress it is necessary for the forest service office and other organizations (such as Natural Resource Conservation Service) to have an accurate program to simulate the behavior of wildfires in all situations. The program is specially developed to be a program that is easy to use and modify to individual preference. It has also been constructed to produce an accurate prediction of the behavior of a wildfire.

The program successfully calculates and outputs the fire’s flame length, spread rate, wind speed and direction, fuel model used, heat generated by the fire per square foot of fuel, and the fire line intensity at the current azimuth. All of these were calculated using the formulas found in Appendix 3: Formulas and Computer Calculations.

Notepad is used in the writing of the program. The is applicable because notepad does not have the special features that Microsoft Word and other word processing programs contain. Because it is more generic it is easier to use for programming. Comments and help icons do not pop up; there are no page breaks, and no spell or grammar checks.

It is recommended that further work be done to predict the behavior of devastating crown fires. Fierce winds, which push the flames to the top of the trees, create what are known as Crown Fires. Crown fires are the most dangerous, hardest to control, and destructive of all the wildfires. They leap form treetop to treetop. In reality, they are impossible to fight. They have been known to hurtle not only firebreaks but also rivers hundreds of feet wide. Today these fires shoot above four hundred feet in the air and usually reach up to Two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. They generally burn up to thirty-five tons of fuel an acre in just an hour; the winds they create exceed one hundred miles per hour. Satellite and aircraft do all research on Crown Fires because it is virtually impossible to collect data and study them. It is said, “Forest fires are not willing research subjects”(Gantenbein 87). These enormous fires completely devastate forests of Ponderosa Pine. Consequently, this slays dozens of species of birds, mammals and insects. And in the end the Ponderosa finds it hard to make a comeback for foreign weeds and trees that did not exist there before choke them (Gantenbein 84-87).