Snow Day Predictor RichmondWill school be cancelled tomorrow in Richmond?

Type your Richmond postal code or "Richmond, British Columbia" into the predictor above. Richmond School District #38 makes its closure call independently by approximately 6:00 am the morning of, announced on the district website, social media, and CKNW 980 AM. Because Richmond sits on the flat Fraser delta at sea level, the predictor weights cold-air pooling and freezing fog risk more heavily than it would for Vancouver or Burnaby in the same airmass.

Three factors stack up over the Fraser delta. First, Richmond is essentially flat at sea level, so cold dense air pools rather than draining off. Second, the city is surrounded by water (the Fraser River north and south arms, the Strait of Georgia to the west) which keeps the boundary layer saturated with moisture. Third, on clear calm nights radiation cooling drops the surface temperature below the dew point, and that moisture deposits directly as ice rather than dew. Vancouver, on higher ground with stronger nighttime winds off the North Shore, rarely sees the same setup.

The delta is the largest flat low-elevation surface in Greater Vancouver, which has two big consequences for winter. Cold air pools across it on clear nights, regularly dropping Richmond morning lows 3–5 °C below Vancouver or Burnaby in the same airmass. And in heavy precipitation events the dikes face combined river freshet, ocean tide, and snowmelt pressure. For school operations, the practical result is that Richmond can be the only Greater Vancouver district closed on a marginal day, and an Arctic outflow that produces only cold in Vancouver produces cold plus freezing surfaces in Richmond.

Richmond SD #38 is a single district covering all Richmond neighbourhoods, including Steveston, Brighouse, West Cambie, Hamilton, and Sea Island, with one citywide closure decision. There are no school-by-school weather calls. That said, Steveston on the Strait of Georgia tends to run a degree warmer overnight than West Cambie or Brighouse, and our forecast pulls hourly data at your exact postal code rather than averaging across the city, so the predictor probability you see is tuned to your specific corner of Richmond.

Three measurable differences. Richmond morning lows on clear nights run several degrees colder than Vancouver because cold air pools on the flat delta. Richmond gets freezing fog several mornings per winter; Vancouver rarely does. And Richmond is more exposed to Arctic outflow funnelling out of the Fraser Canyon, with sustained northeast winds driving wind chills well below Vancouver values. The result is that Richmond SD #38 and Vancouver SD #39 sometimes make opposite calls on the same morning, with Richmond closing while Vancouver stays open.

Not automatically. Conseil scolaire francophone (SD #93) is a province-wide French-language board headquartered in Richmond, and it makes its own closure decisions for Ecole des Navigateurs independently of Richmond SD #38. CSF often coordinates with the local English district on weather days, but on borderline mornings the calls can diverge. Parents of CSF students should check the CSF website and Twitter feed in addition to the local Richmond district.

Greater Vancouver runs from sea level (Richmond, Steveston, Sea Island) to more than 1,200 metres on the North Shore mountains. A Pacific frontal system in a marginal airmass typically falls as rain at sea level and snow above 300–500 metres. Sea-level snow in Richmond requires either an existing Arctic outflow to pre-cool the boundary layer or a strong overrunning event with cold air trapped in the delta cold-air pool. Elevation snow on Cypress, Grouse, and Seymour is much more frequent and is not a reliable indicator that Richmond schools will close.