About this calculator

This site answers one question: what are the odds school is cancelled tomorrow? It exists because raw forecasts are useless for that purpose. "Four inches of snow" tells you nothing until you know where you live, when the snow falls, and how your district behaves.

Where the data comes from

Forecasts are fetched live from Open-Meteo, an open weather API that aggregates national meteorological services including NOAA and ECMWF. Location lookup uses Open-Meteo's geocoder, with Zippopotam.us as a fallback for postal codes. Everything runs in your browser — there is no server of ours in between.

How the model was built

The weighting reflects what school administrators consistently describe as their decision inputs: accumulation first, then temperature and wind, then the practicalities of their own district. The regional and school-type adjustments exist because the same storm produces opposite decisions fifty miles apart, and any model that ignores that is worthless.

It is a heuristic, not a trained model. It does not have access to your district's history, its plow budget, or the judgement of the person who drives the routes at 4am.

What it cannot do

It cannot tell you what your district decided — only your district can. It cannot see power outages, staffing shortages, or building problems. Beyond three days it is limited by the forecast itself, which can move by several inches.

Questions or corrections are welcome via the contact page.