The late season snowstorms that trekked across the province have helped out when it comes to this season's spring runoff, and that's good news for the main reservoirs that supply much of Saskatchewan's water to residents and industries.
Saskatchewan's Water Security Agency has been measuring that melt and seeing what kind of effect it's having on the province's reservoirs.
Spokesperson Patrick Boyle says that the province is looking good as far as most reservoirs are concerned.
"Right now, reservoirs across Saskatchewan are in pretty good shape with 33 out of the 45 major reservoirs, nearly 3/4 are near full or expected to fill, and then we have another six reservoirs that are between 70 and 90 per cent full and still filling. So we only have about 6 wells that are likely not to fill this year and most of those are in southwestern Saskatchewan. So that's a fairly typical scenario down there."
Boyle says the reservoir retention is mostly thanks to a late snow which added much-needed moisture to the province.
"There's a couple of different things where we did receive some late sort of moisture there the end of March, that snowstorm that came through and dumped a lot of heavy, wet snow, which helped improve our spring runoff outlook. That combined with the conservative over-winter operating plan for most of the reservoirs in Saskatchewan and that's where we see ourselves in pretty good shape for most of the reservoirs across the province, particularly in the southeast where we're doing quite well right now."
Over the summer people should keep an eye on moisture conditions as a big rain could cause reservoirs to spill over.
"Over the last couple of years, it's been fairly dry in a lot of areas. So that's why we did take that conservative approach and try to store as much water as we possibly could here in the event that we maybe didn't see the same amount of precipitation we would in the past," said Boyle, "So you know it's one of those kind of things where we're always watching the weather, we're always managing and always paying attention to it."
Boyle says people should keep an eye out for any extreme weather events over the summer.