Greater Montreal
Montreal absorbs heavy snow better than most cities because it physically hauls it away, so freezing rain is often the bigger threat. The estimate below is loaded with live Montreal forecast data.
Live Montreal forecast estimate
Enter a location to compare tomorrow's snow, ice, temperature, wind and morning timing.
Local conditions
Montreal sits on an island in the St. Lawrence River, in a valley that acts as a conduit for cold air moving in at the surface while milder, moist air arrives above it from the south. That vertical arrangement makes the corridor one of North America's most reliable freezing-rain zones. The city also receives substantial snowfall, and it responds with large-scale clearing and removal operations in which loaded snow is hauled out of dense streets rather than pushed aside. The combination means routine heavy snow is absorbed with less disruption than elsewhere, while icing events hit disproportionately hard.
What actually drives a decision
Ice is the hazard that most reliably disrupts Montreal, affecting power, sidewalks, steps and transportation simultaneously. Because it produces no depth, an icing forecast can look minor next to a snowfall figure while being the far worse outcome. Check whether the snow-and-ice factor cites an icing signal.
Montreal's clearing and removal programme means an accumulation that would stop a milder city is handled here. Read a moderate snowfall result in that context, and give more weight to timing and precipitation type than to the total.
Quebec schools are organised into school service centres and school boards, and the French-language and English-language systems announce independently. There is no single city-wide closure notice, so identify the body responsible for the specific school.
Many Montreal students walk or use public transit. Sidewalk, stair and crossing conditions before dawn therefore carry real weight, and those surfaces are cleared after main roads. Wind chill during a cold snap adds direct exposure risk at stops.
The forecast for the coordinates above is scored against six weighted factors: snow and ice, temperature, wind chill, morning timing, area and routes, and school level. Around Montreal the rows that most often carry the number are temperature, snow and ice. Every factor appears in the result with its own value, score bar and published weight, so a percentage is never presented without the reasoning behind it. The methodology page documents each threshold, and the accuracy and limitations page sets out what the model cannot observe.
This site does not publish closure thresholds for any school system, because those are operational judgements rather than published numbers. What it can do is point you at the organisations that actually decide. Around Montreal, QC those include:
Treat the estimate on this page as a reason to prepare and to keep checking, never as an announcement. A school system can close buildings, delay the start, cancel transportation only, dismiss early or move to a different learning format, and those outcomes are not interchangeable.
Primary sources for weather warnings and road conditions covering Montreal. School decisions still come from the systems listed above.
Montreal questions
No estimate can answer that. The service centre or board responsible for the specific school announces its own suspension of classes or transportation, and the French-language and English-language systems publish separately. Identify the right body before you start looking.
The St. Lawrence Valley traps a shallow layer of cold air at the surface while milder air flows in above it. Rain falling from that warm layer freezes on contact with cold ground, and the valley's geography makes the arrangement unusually persistent.
Less readily than in many cities, because municipal clearing and removal capacity is high. Timing and precipitation type usually matter more than the accumulation total, which is why the factor breakdown is shown alongside the percentage.
The interface and content are currently in English only. Forecast data for Montreal is fully supported and units default to Celsius and centimetres.
It changes what the second day looks like more than the first. Clearing opens the streets, but loading and hauling snow away from dense blocks takes days, so parking, sidewalk width and bus stop access can stay compromised well after the storm itself has ended.
Still deciding what to do with the number? Read how schools make the final call and the guide to the best times to check a forecast.