Run the Caldor Benchmark from the CLI

This tutorial shows how to download the 2021 Caldor Fire benchmark data and run benchmark from the firebench command line.

1. Install FireBench

From the repository root, install FireBench in your Python environment:

pip install .

Check that the CLI is available:

firebench list

The Caldor Fire benchmark is case 1, also shown as 001 (both id can be used).

2. Download the Caldor Fire case

Create a working directory, then download the latest data archive for case 1:

mkdir caldor_cli_example
cd caldor_cli_example
firebench data get 1

The command downloads the latest registered data archive for the Caldor Fire benchmark into the current directory. Extract the archive so that Caldor.h5 is available in the working directory:

unzip v2026.2.zip

If you downloaded a different version, replace v2026.2.zip with the archive file that firebench data get 1 created.

3. Run the benchmark

Run benchmark case 1 with the CDI aggregation scheme and allow existing outputs to be overwritten:

firebench run -c 1 -o -a CDI my_model_output.h5

This command writes the default Caldor outputs in the working directory:

Caldor_rslt.json
Caldor.pdf
Caldor.log

Use a different model output file by replacing the final my_model_output.h5 argument with the path to your FireBench standard HDF5 output. If you don’t have a model output yet, you can test using the observational dataset Caldor.h5 as input to get a perfect scorecard.

4. Useful CLI commands

Main helpers

firebench --help
firebench list --help
firebench data --help
firebench run --help

List all benchmark cases:

firebench list

List available Caldor data versions:

firebench data versions 1

Download a specific Caldor data version:

firebench data get 1 --version 2026.1