Pumpkin Spice Lattes are back at Starbucks around the nation, so that must mean autumn has already arrived, right? Okay, maybe relying on the reappearance of highly commercialized novelty menu items isn’t the most accurate way to gauge the turning of the seasons.
But, since we seem to be living in an era in which the world’s weather systems seem to have gone haywire (e.g., the persistent heat waves seen around the globe this summer), determining when Mother Nature is about to slip into her rich fall raiment can be quite difficult.
And, of course, avid leaf-peepers are particularly keen to catch the annual phenomenon of America’s foliage as it transitions into a kaleidoscope of fall colors. But, even before climate change complicated matters, predicting when the leaves in any given area would reach their peak pigmentation was always something of a guessing game.
Nowadays, however, there’s an interactive online tool to help you do just that. It comes to internet users courtesy of SmokyMountains.com, which uses a number of factors, including as the types of trees in each region, temperature trends, precipitation levels, historical data and user-submitted observations to produce its annual Fall Foliage Prediction Map.
Users can move the timeline slider from one week to the next, for dates from September through November, with colors indicating when the changing of the leaves is set to start, progressing to patchy, partial, nearing peak, peak and past peak. As the site states, “While no tool can be 100% accurate, this tool is meant to help travelers better time their trips to have the best opportunity of catching peak color each year.”
“Similar to a weekend weather forecast, the timing of our map update is important,” the map’s creator, David Angotti, told Travel + Leisure. “The backbone of the map is meteorology… With our unique blend of historical and forecast data, we are able to make a highly accurate prediction by the end of August. The drastic year-to-year changes dictate that we create a new map from scratch with new data each year. Our end goal is to produce a map that’s useful and fun.”
This year, SmokyMountains.com has gone even a step further to help leaf-lovers identify where and when they can witness nature’s seasonal spectacle. From 2023, users who fill out a fall foliage report have the option of uploading photos of conditions in their area to help improve the forecast.