Tennessee Wildfire, Smoke, and Air Quality Map

Fire season and landscape

Spring fire season arrives before green-up, but the higher fire risk in the mountains comes in fall, when drought years line up cured leaf litter, low humidity, and wind on steep terrain. October and November of a dry year have produced Tennessee's most serious mountain fires. Prescribed burning runs through the cooler months and accounts for some of what the hotspot layer shows.

The Cherokee National Forest runs the length of Tennessee's eastern border on both sides of the Great Smoky Mountains, holding the steepest and most fire-prone terrain in the state. Westward, the Cumberland Plateau's oak woods and gorges carry spring and fall fire, and the landscape flattens toward the Mississippi River bottoms. The Tennessee and Cumberland river systems are heavily dammed but still flood in extreme rain events.

• Fall mountain fires in East Tennessee move on wind events; the red flag warning and fire weather outlook layers flag the days when that alignment arrives.
• Valley inversions can hold smoke over towns along the Tennessee River corridor even when the fires are distant; the air quality layer reflects what the monitors are actually reading.
• Cherokee National Forest prescribed burns register as hotspots through the cooler months; the wildfire perimeter layer distinguishes mapped incidents from routine burning.