While the calendar says it’s still summer, here in Serbia, it started to feel like fall. While I’m not ready to give up on swimming in the river just yet, I am looking forward to those orange and yellow shades in the trees surrounding it. I mean, fall landscapes are just the best!
If you’re into fall landscapes, Smoky Mountains National Park brings you yet another fall foliage prediction map. This interactive tool lets you predict the colors of the leaves across the U.S. and helps you plan your travels and shoots in advance.
How it started
In 2013, potential visitors to the Smoky Mountain region started asking about when the leaves would be ideally yellow and orange. From these questions, Smoky Mountains built the first version of the fall leaf, consistently improving it each year.
In 2022, they introduced a form that allowed end-users to fill out a report on the fall foliage they had experienced in their region. “These reports have helped us identify both strengths and weaknesses in the previous model, and we were able to refine it using the end-user data on top of our usual data points,” the team writes.
Last year, Smoky Mountains NP added the ability for end-users to submit photos alongside their fall foliage report. “It’s been instrumental in helping us fine-tune our data collection for this year,” they explain. “While we continuously make our end-user data set better, we have made no other changes to our Fall Foliage map. Instead, we will focus on continuously gathering end-user data for future predictions.”
Accuracy
The map gets more and more accurate every year with all the improvements Smoky Mountains NP team adds. It utilizes a refined data model that depends on a combination of factors: historical temperature and precipitation, forecast temperature and precipitation, the type of tree known to be prominent in that geographic region, the historical trends in that area, and user data.
A couple of years ago (2022), we introduced the capability for end-users to provide real-time leaf reports that will impact both updates and future models. However, similar to any meteorological forecast that is dependent on weather variables, the leaf predictions are not 100% accurate. This is why we’ve added the ability for end-users to submit real-time photos last year as well. After publishing our predictive fall foliage map for nearly a decade, we are confident in our data sources, process, and algorithm.
How to use?
The fall leaf map is intuitive and easy to use. You can play with it below or visit Smoky Mountains.com: in both cases, you’ll see a slider at the bottom set to the current week. You can slide it to the right to see the predicted progression of fall. The green indicates the trees in that area of the country have not begun to change colors. The brown color means that the leaves are past their peak. The remaining colors show a colorful depiction of the progression of fall.
