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Over the last several decades in forest and woodland ecosystems of the southwestern United States, wildfire size and severity have increased, thereby increasing the vulnerability of these systems to type conversions, invasive species, and other disturbances. A combination of land use history and climate change is widely thought to be contributing to the changing fire regimes. We examined climate-fire relationships in forest and woodland ecosystems from 1984 to 2015 in Arizona and New Mexico using 1) an expanded satellite-derived burn severity dataset that incorporates over one million additional burned hectares when compared to MTBS data, and 2) climate variables including temperature, precipitation, and vapor pressure deficit (VPD). Regional climate-fire relationships were assessed by correlating annual area burned, area burned at high and low severity, and percent high severity with fire season (May …