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Wildfires cause billions of dollars in damages in the United States each year. Improving predictions of when and where fires are likely to occur, particularly due to varying climatic conditions, is important for planning and managing resources both now and in the future. Previous work analyzing tree ring-based fire history records and climate reconstructions in the American Southwest indicates that widespread fire is associated with anomalously dry Palmer drought severity index (PDSI) values during the fire year, and lags anomalously wet PDSI values by several years. Given that PDSI integrates over several seasons, the more specific seasonal signal of these moisture anomalies is unknown. Also, the significance of wet conditions preceding fire years is not fully tested, such that the observed association could result from natural climate variability rather than being causal. We used superposed epoch analysis (SEA) to …