Snow Day Predictor NunavutWill school be cancelled tomorrow in Nunavut?

Type "Iqaluit, Nunavut" or your X0A postal code into the predictor at the top of this page to see tomorrow’s probability for Iqaluit schools. The Nunavut Department of Education makes the call locally based on blizzard warnings and visibility forecasts; our overnight probability is generated from the same Environment and Climate Change Canada model data the Department uses.

Wind chill values past −40 °C are routine throughout the Nunavut winter — closing for cold would mean closing for most of the school year. Schools are well-insulated, students dress for it, and outdoor recess is suspended on cold days while indoor instruction continues. Blizzards are different because they create whiteout conditions where students cannot safely walk to school and emergency services cannot reach communities. The trigger is visibility, not temperature.

Almost every Nunavut school is a walking-distance school, so the question southern Canadian boards ask — "can buses run safely" — does not apply. Instead, the decision turns on whether a young child can safely walk a few blocks in current conditions. That makes blowing snow and visibility the dominant factors, and it is why a Nunavut closure can be triggered by a storm that southern Canadian boards would handle with a bus cancellation only.

Enter "Rankin Inlet, Nunavut" or "Arviat, Nunavut" into the predictor above. Kivalliq communities sit on the western Hudson Bay coast and see rapid storm changes through freeze-up; closures are coordinated within the community by the local school in consultation with the Nunavut Department of Education.

In Iqaluit December daylight drops to roughly four hours; in High Arctic communities like Resolute and Grise Fiord the sun does not rise at all from late October to mid-February. Schools operate normally through polar night, but blowing snow during dark hours dramatically reduces what visibility remains and contributes to closure decisions on storm days. Our forecast factors daylight into Arctic communities in a way southern Canadian predictor sites do not.

The Nunavut Department of Education is the territorial government department that directly operates all 43 public schools across 25 communities. There are no school districts or boards beneath it — schools report to the Department, and closure decisions are made community-by-community by school staff in consultation with the Department. Instruction is bilingual in Inuktitut and English, with French provided separately by CSFN.

Yes. Closure decisions and weather conditions are identical across language streams within a community, so the predictor covers Inuktitut-medium and English-medium schools under the same forecast. The interface itself is in English, but the underlying probability for the school applies regardless of the language of instruction.

High Arctic communities are challenging because the Environment and Climate Change Canada model network is sparser at extreme latitudes. We compensate by giving more weight to the Canadian Meteorological Centre regional model and to upstream Baffin Bay storm signals. Polar-night daylight is factored in. Communities like Resolute and Grise Fiord see frequent enough closures through the winter that single-day forecast accuracy is less load-bearing than the storm-track confidence we surface alongside the probability.

Yes. École des Trois-Soleils in Iqaluit is the primary CSFN school, and its closure decisions almost always align with the Nunavut Department of Education call for Iqaluit because both serve the same community under the same weather conditions. The predictor returns the same overnight probability for both, with CSFN’s independent decision noted when it diverges.