Despite the spring snowfall in Calgary, preliminary data collected in Kananaskis indicates the water equivalency of the mountain park snowpacks is greater than average but not significantly so and carries no increased risk of flooding.

“It’s always a little different out in the mountains,” said Jon Pedlar, a water monitoring technologist. “What’s happening in the city is always what people are thinking about."

On Monday, Pedlar and fellow technologist May Guan packed their cross-country skis and clipboards and made their monthly pilgrimage to visit seven sites in the provincial park that are only accessible by helicopter.

Pedlar says the snowpack readings exceed the 30-year average but are far from record-setting. “So far, this year we’re on track about 125 to 130 per cent of average,” explained Pedlar. “It’s a good year but it’s not an unusually crazy high year.”

According to Guan, there has been a visible increase in accumulation since their previous visit near the beginning of March. “There’s so much more snow than last month.”

Guan says the focus of their data collection is the water equivalent the snowpack as snowpacks can vary from week-to-week and between regions. “The snowpack’s always different,” explained Guan. "It might be powdery one month, it might be windblown one month, it might be sunbaked another month.”

“By water equivalent, we mean if this snowpack was to melt all of a sudden, how much water are we standing on?”

Data has been collected from most of the site for decades and the information has proven invaluable in forecasting Calgary’s water supply.

“It’s really beneficial to keep coming back, same sites, year-after-year-after-year, and be very consistent about it and that way we’ve got a really good comparable data set,” explained Pedlar. “That really helps the forecasters determine where we’re at in relation to previous years.”

Pedlar says increases in snowpack measurements are not indicative of inevitable flooding as extreme melting rates require external factors.

“The mountain snowpack, on its own, is not going to cause significant flooding,” explained Pedlar. “We always need that big spring precipitation event to trigger a real flood.”

In addition to the seven sites visited in Kananaskis Country on Monday, provincial technologists also visit snow survey sites in Banff National Park on a monthly basis. Data is collected from late November until the first week of May.

With files from CTV’s Kevin Fleming