After the worst wildfire season in 25 years, firefighters are looking to new technology and a bigger budget to help them keep catastrophic blazes in check this summer.

While it is still early in the season, fire danger already is high in southwestern Arizona and the tip of California. The dryness of fuel is below 15 percent as far north as Idaho and as far east as Colorado, and below 5 percent in a swath from southern Nevada through Arizona.

Nationally, the year has been relatively quiet so far, said Lorraine Buck, spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. A total of 28,555 acres have burned, including 1,884 in Southern California. The 10-year national average is 36,385 acres.

Last year, fire season was well under way in February, starting in the Midwest. As the season progressed, big fires were reported across most of the West.

By the end of August, Marines and Army troops were tapped to relieve exhausted fire crews in California and Oregon. By October, fires still were burning in several western states.

That record season - in which 94,000 fires burned more than 6 million acres - convinced Congress to change the way it budgets for wildfires, allocating more money ahead of time rather than picking up most of the costs after the fact.

Last year, Congress appropriated only $90 million for putting out wildfires, with $100 million as a contingency fund, despite the fact that the 10-year average expenditure was $322 million, said Mary Jo Lavin, national director of fire and aviation for the Forest Service in Washington.

Congress has allocated $210 million this year with a contingency fund of $250 million.

Next year, the Forest Service hopes to get additional funds for setting prescribed fires that will reduce the danger of future catastrophic fires and improve the health of public lands. That eventually will save money, Lavin said.

Federal lands agencies hope to set 750,000 acres of forest and rangeland on fire this year to help clear overstocked forests of dead and dying timber. By the year 2005, they hope to increase the area to 3 million acres.

Now, however, rather than just putting out any fire that starts, firefighters must assess whether it would be good or bad for the land, air quality, endangered wildlife and people living in the woods.

“California was designed by nature to burn,” said Forest Service spokesman Matt Mathes. “Putting a lot of people into an ecosystem like that creates a lot of challenges.”

To meet them, the Forest Service has given California an extra $750,000 to fight fires this year. Besides facing drought conditions that make fires easier to start, many national forests in the Sierra Nevada lost roads to flooding last winter, making it necessary to use more air tankers and helicopters to fight fires.

Firefighters have some new tools. In Utah, some crews are equipped with hand-held Global Positioning System units that allow them to map a fire from the ground, instead of relying on expensive aerial photography. They also have new computer databases that show the location of a fire, the terrain, type of vegetation, closest water source and who owns the land.

Computer programs were helping firefighters predict the weather and fire behavior last year. This year a few helicopters will be available that can shoot fire retardant horizontally rather than just dropping it. And the emergency fire shelter every firefighter wears on a belt is being redesigned and should be operational in a couple of years.