Though Alberta’s snowpack is highly talked about, many may not know what it means or how it impacts water.

In April, UCalgary students headed to Kananaskis to check for themselves.

During an out-of-class field day, University of Calgary students and researchers went to the Fortress Mountain Research Basin to learn and apply techniques used to measure snow accumulation and quality, density, and water content.

Throughout the day, students were looking for snow-water equivalence.

“You go in, you test the depth of the snow, and you’re also looking at the density of the snow. Correspondingly, you can come up with what we call a snow water equivalent, which is when we melt down a set volume of this snow, how much water will come from it,” UCalgary water scientist David Barrett said.

“If we’ve got a really dense snowpack, when it melts, it releases a lot of water. If we have a less dense snowpack, less water comes from that.”

Students were also looking at the quality of the snow, Barrett said.

“Not all snow is created equal. There’s different shapes and sizes of snowflakes and all kinds of different interrelated pieces,” he said.

As it’s early in the process, now only a month since the field day, results and data aren’t finalized. Generally, this year’s snowpacks in the Rockies west and south of Calgary are intriguing.

“There’s an above normal snowpack in a lot of the areas upstream of Calgary,” Barrett said, citing an Alberta Government survey.

“But there’s an inverse challenge in that there’s low snowpack in the further South regions of Alberta. So it’s really variable, even just between the Banff region and Waterton region.”

Using digital models and the data collected in the Fortress Basin, researchers are trying to understand the variance, Barrett said.

Changing water analysis landscape

Though climate change has influenced snowpack, and therefore water, it has not made things noticeably harder to predict, Barrett said.

“We’re seeing much bigger highs and much lower lows, both from a rain and snow perspective, but we’ve also seen really rapid advances in computing and the technology side, which has actually allowed us to advance some of those more technologically or computationally heavy models,” he said.

“So we’re able to do that a little bit more effectively than we were, say, a few years ago. It’s becoming increasingly complex but we’re also having more and more power to actually understand.”

Researchers’ abilities to predict a year’s snowpack are one thing, but seeing how it impacts water supply is another issue, according to Barrett.

“We rely on snowpack and glacier melt for our water,” he said, adding that essentially, the denser the snowpack is in the mountains, the longer and more consistent the water flow is in the prairies.

Barring any infrastructure malfunctions, something Calgarians are familiar with at this point, Barrett said that water shouldn’t be a problem in 2026, within reason.

Frank Frigo, with the City of Calgary, told LWC in April that, given some of the late-season snow, Calgary was in good shape water-wise, at least in the early season.

“It often becomes difficult to supply all that water unless we have an ample alpine snowpack, so this is really wonderful for us in that regard,” he said.

“It really helps stave off the potential for early-season drought.”

Future stability, however, is still up in the air, according to Barrett.

“There’s an incredible demand in southern Alberta and Western Canada for water. Southern Alberta relies very heavily on water for irrigation, and if we’re starting to see increased variability, it’s going to pose a risk for water availability,” he said.

“We’ve seen this hyperlocally with our water main break, where we had to cut back, we had to reduce our use. Think about that on a much larger scale, as Calgary and the surrounding area keeps growing, demand on water keeps growing and our availability of that water becomes a little less reliable.”

The potential for water-based supply and demand issues is something Barrett has been hearing about from experts for some time. He said that currently, we’re following right on track with predictions.

Though it’s outside of his direct area of expertise, Barrett flagged the potential for forest fires during light snowpack years, both them happening and our ability to fight and contain them.

“There’s a lot of discussion around how wet the soil is, because that can have a major impact on forest fire spread. Extreme events, which are becoming more common, where we see these larger thunderstorms with lightning, hail, all that stuff, do have the ability to also rapidly increase the prevalence of forest fires as well,” he said.

“There’s definitely links between water, the weather, and forest fires.”