Environmental Economics

Eleanor Barkhorn:

… A new map from Reddit user Alexandr Trubetskoy (a.k.a. atrubetskoy) is sure to stoke this regional competition. Using data "taken from hundreds of various points from user responses…interpolated using NOAA's average annual snowfall days map," Trubetskoy made a map showing how much snow it typically takes to close schools in the U.S. and Canada. Notice that for much of the southern U.S., all it takes is "any snow" to shut schools down. For the Upper Midwest and Canada, two feet of snow are required for a closure. …

Before this map gives Midwesterners a superiority complex, it's worth remembering: School closures say more about an area's infrastructure than the toughness of its citizens. Schools in the South close at the mere hint of snow not because the people who live there are wimps, but because snow is such a rare event—and most cities there don't have a fleet of snow plows the way Northern ones do.

If you click on the map to enlarge it you can see three wimpy counties in the northwest corner of North Carolina. I live in one of those. And we have plenty of snow infrastructure. 

Hat tip: MR