Snow Day Predictor YukonWill school be cancelled tomorrow in Yukon?

Type your Yukon postal code or "Whitehorse, Yukon" into the predictor at the top of this page for tomorrow’s probability. Full closures of Yukon schools are rare in any given storm — the much more common outcome is a modified day, with outdoor recess cancelled and bus runs adjusted. Both outcomes are surfaced in the prediction.

There is no single published number. The Department of Education uses sustained wind chill past about −45 °C, combined with route conditions and the duration of the cold, as the practical threshold for modifying the school day. Outdoor recess is typically cancelled well before any building closure — usually around −35 to −40 °C wind chill, depending on the school.

Yukon is dry — annual snowfall in Whitehorse is well under what falls on Ontario’s lake-effect zones. Plowing keeps up easily, and most rural schools are within walking distance of homes, so a long bus-route cancellation is rarely the deciding factor. Extreme cold, by contrast, is constant: −40 °C is the routine winter baseline. Closure decisions weight wind chill and cold duration far more than snow accumulation.

Every public school in Yukon is operated directly by the territorial Department of Education — 28 schools, one operator, no elected school boards in between. Closure decisions are made centrally or at the school level rather than by a board vote, and they are often coordinated with First Nations governments where the school sits on or adjacent to settlement land. This is the only jurisdiction in Canada with that structure.

Enter "Dawson City, Yukon" or your Y0B postal code above. Robert Service School operates through conditions — routine −45 °C wind chill and roughly five hours of sunlight in December — that would close every school south of 60. The predictor accounts for that local operating baseline, so a Dawson forecast looks very different from a Whitehorse forecast on the same day.

Old Crow sits north of the Arctic Circle. The sun does not rise for several weeks around the December solstice, and wind chill routinely passes −50 °C. Chief Zzeh Gittlit School operates through both, but the Department of Education and the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation coordinate closely on travel safety, and short modified days are more common in midwinter than full closures. The predictor surfaces cold-plus-darkness explicitly for Old Crow rather than treating it as a generic Yukon community.

Yes. The Commission scolaire francophone du Yukon operates École Émilie-Tremblay in Whitehorse — the only French-language K–12 school in the territory. CSFY makes its own closure decisions, but on extreme-cold days the call typically aligns with the Department of Education. The Whitehorse forecast applies to both.

We pull forecast data at your exact coordinates rather than averaging across a broad zone, which matters in Yukon where cold-air pooling can leave Pelly Crossing 10 degrees colder than Whitehorse two hundred kilometres away. That said, model resolution is coarser at high latitudes than in southern Canada, so we publish the confidence interval alongside the probability for communities like Old Crow, Beaver Creek, and Ross River.

Environment and Climate Change Canada issues an Extreme Cold Warning for Yukon when wind chill is expected to reach −45 °C or colder for at least two hours. That warning is a public health and safety alert — it does not automatically close schools. The Department of Education uses the warning as one input into a separate decision that also weighs route conditions, the duration of the cold, and the time of day buses would be running. Many Yukon school days proceed normally under an active Extreme Cold Warning.