SnowDayCalc.net estimates the chance that school (or a college campus) will close or delay because of winter weather. It is a forecast aid. It is not your district, not the National Weather Service, and not a closure order.
Who built this
Pages on this site are published by the Snow Day Calculator Team. We are operators of a weather-driven school-closure tool, not a school board. Where we cite local reporting or district winter letters, we say so. Where we are giving a planning range, we label it as typical, not official policy.
How a prediction is made
- You enter a ZIP code or city, or allow location.
- You pick a school type: public urban, public suburban, public rural, private/prep, or college.
- We pull hourly fields from ECMWF and NOAA model data.
- We weight snow, ice risk, temperature, and wind, with extra weight on 4 AM to 7 AM local time, because that is when transportation directors drive routes and decide.
- You get a probability, an hourly snowfall read, and a short-range outlook.
School type changes the threshold. A rural bus garage will fold on ice that a downtown district can salt through. Colleges almost never close; they delay or go remote. If you pick the wrong type, the number will be wrong in a boring, predictable way.
Why we do this
Parents and students should be able to plan childcare and travel the night before without pretending a website can overrule a superintendent. The product exists to translate commute-window weather into a risk score. It does not exist to farm “snow day” clicks with fake certainty.
What can still make us wrong
- A snow band 20 miles off the model.
- Freezing rain that was supposed to stay liquid.
- A district that switched to e-learning and no longer calls traditional snow days.
- Driver shortages, hills, or a bus contractor that cancels independently.
Related: How accurate are snow day calculators? · When districts announce
Official sources you should still use
Bookmark your district website, join the official text list, and treat TV crawls as a backup. If our number and your district disagree, the district wins.