Near-field spray characteristics are established from local measurements which are acquired by data acquisition sub-system capable of complete scanning of the area (volume) of interest in the spray which uses different laser-based probes (shadowgraphy, PIV, diffraction) to obtain drops related measurements. A mechanical patternator measures volume flux distribution of the spray under study. The measurement data are post-processed to obtain spatially-resolved spray characteristics which are mapped in a spherical coordinate system consistent with the kinematics of the spray. A data compression scheme is used to generate compact analytical functions describing the nozzle spray based on the measurement data. These analytical functions may be useful for initiating the nozzle spray in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) based spray dispersion and fire suppression modeling.