The purpose of this project is to develop reanalysis-based wildland fire monitoring capabilities over North America for a time period spanning as long as possible. We will produce fire-weather indices derived from meteorological variables, such as temperature, wind speed, and humidity. This poster will present initial results toward determining the suitability of the NOAA-CIRES-DOE 20th Century Reanalysis, Version 3 (20CRv3) for generating fire-weather indices. We compare fields from the surface-pressure-based 20CRv3 to the full-input ERA5 reanalysis for the time period 1946-2015. As examples, we focus on 3-hourly data of near-surface variables for the months of May and August, which correspond to the beginning and the middle of the fire season, respectively. Preliminary findings show good agreement between 20CRv3 and ERA5 over North America, having high rank correlations (>0.80) for 2-meter air temperature, 10-meter wind speed, and 2-meter vapor pressure deficit. This investigation is ongoing, and it will be expanded to include an evaluation of the aforementioned variables at pressure levels from the surface to 500 hPa, as well as precipitation for all months.