In New Zealand, wildfire is a hazard where the focus has successfully been shifted from response to readiness, and to risk mitigation through reduction.  This shift has been enabled through the development and implementation of a new fire weather system (FWSYS) that provides practitioners and emergency managers with a tool that both alerts them to potentially dangerous conditions, and provides access to all the information they need both to understand current fire risk in the rural landscape, and, for the first time, how that risk is expected to change over the coming days. The new FWSYS is a joint development between NIWA and Scion and incorporates results from the latest weather prediction and fire research that has been carried out for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, the NZ Fire Service Commission and the National Rural Fire Authority. It is based on the concept that fire intensity, a function of fuel type and environmental factors, indicates suppression difficulty as originally developed within the Canadian Forest Fire Behaviour Prediction System.

In this paper we will describe the components of the FWSYS, including meteorological data ingestion and quality control, how these data are used to generate national maps of fire risk indices for existent conditions, the weather prediction science underpinning the generation of fire risk indices out to six days ahead, and the delivery pathways employed to provide these data to end users (i.e. via SMS, GIS, website and PC Application).