2022 Fall Foliage Prediction Map
smokymountains.com
smokymountains.com
Worst website ever.
It has a link for you to submit your observations and improve the data.
I'm in Michigan. This map seems to change all of Michigan to Peak at the same time, which absolutely does not happen.
It varies as you move south in the state, typically a couple weeks apart from way northern Michigan to down by Detroit. Heck, I've been in the Upper Peninsula at peak leaves and then they started falling, gone south a few days later to the northern Lower Peninsula and things were just starting to pop, then home down near Detroit almost everything was still green.
That's... just how it works in Michigan. But that's not what this map shows. And therefore I've no reason to believe it.
Doesn’t hurt to stop in Asheville (NC), Gatlinburg (TN), or Cherokee (NC) briefly either if you have the time.
There are times when it takes 2 hours to go from I-40 to Gatlinburg on TN-66. It's worse than NYC/LA traffic.
Have you ever been up near the Cumberland Gap around this time? I imagine that it's also beautiful but less crowded (I've only ever been there in the summer).
The most interesting theory is that predators like hawks simply don't recognize white animals as prey, which is pretty crazy in my opinion. The page shares an anecdote that sometimes visiting dogs would chase gray squirrels but not the white ones.
This is just plain wrong, and makes no sense. If the leaves froze and died during the winter, how is this different from the tree losing the leaves to begin with?
Trees lose their leaves to stop the process of drawing water up from the roots through their trunks. If water were to go through the freeze/thaw cycle inside the long "straws" of the tree trunk, the tree would be torn apart from the expansion/contraction cycle of the ice.
The trees that normally shed their leaves had not done so yet and huge numbers of them suffered serious breaks from the weight of the snow clinging to the leaves.
It was at that point that I realized the purpose of shedding leaves in the winter.
Prior to that I used to think, "Okay, so what if there is LESS sun in the winter time? Why bother shedding leaves when you can pick up some extra energy from winter sunlight? And you don't have to expend the energy rebuilding leaves in the spring.'
My suspicion is that the leaves fall primarily to avoid snow-induced catastrophic breaks and related damage.