The fall 2016 Chimney Tops 2 fire is of particular interest because of its unexpectedly high severity and impacts to communities and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Until 2016, fall fires in the southern Appalachians were not well appreciated. Before then, most wildfires and prescribed fires occurred in the spring, with most severe wildfire behavior either associated with the rare summer fire or short fire runs. Fall fires tend to occur during drought as freshly fallen leaf litter provides sufficient fuel to carry fire across the topography. In spring, rising humidity with green-up normally checks fire growth and extreme behavior, but phenological constraints are loosened as the fall progresses without rain as transpiration drops regionally with leaf-fall. This historic fire burned just after Thanksgiving and became the capstone of a fire season that began in mid October.

Monitoring fire severity and recovery is relatively straightforward with NDVI. Thanks to the extreme weather, most severely burned patches were larger than elsewhere that fall, with strong departures much lower across the south facing slopes than observed earlier. The largest single severe fire patch seen across the Southern Appalachians was on Bull Head, an area with ericaceous shrubs and table mountain pine that burned so severely that its NDVI recovery trailed other severely burned areas by several years as shown in this map sequence.