A late-season snowstorm may look like relief, but it can’t salvage a historically bad snowpack year.

While it’s too early to measure Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s storm’s impact, water experts said a single snowstorm won’t reverse months of below-average snowpack.

“This year is proving difficult to quantify,” Brad Udall, senior water and climate research scholar at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center, said in an email.

“As of April 1, worst ever. Right now, no.  But this is still an awful year.”

Cities across the metro Denver region received between 5 and 12 inches with the snowstorm that moved in Tuesday evening, according to the National Weather Service.

The mountains received significantly more.

Estes Park, for example, got slammed with 28 inches.

Mountain snowpack acts as a natural reservoir that supplies water to Colorado and other Western states as it melts.

“Overall, a storm like this is not going to make a major impact on the entire system,” said Lindsay DeFrates, a Colorado River District spokesperson. “This is a great storm and we will take anything that we can get, but much of it is going to be used up by the soil.”

The snow is welcomed, DeFrates said, but it “doesn’t move the needle on the drought.”

The reason is timing. The snowpack had already peaked weeks earlier, limiting how much this storm can help.

This year’s snowpack ranks among the worst on record, heightening concerns about water supplies across the Colorado River Basin.

Water managers across the Front Range — Arvada, Aurora, Boulder, Denver, Golden and Thornton — have all declared drought restrictions to preserve water levels and, hopefully, avoid stricter measures later this summer when demand naturally increases.

Denver Water declared a Stage 1 drought in March, an unprecedented move so early. Denver Water depends on snowpack for a water supply that serves roughly one in four Coloradans.

What has made this year so concerning is that the snowpack peaked weeks earlier than typical and an unseasonably warm March accelerated the melt. Dry soil has absorbed much of the runoff, leaving less water to flow downstream.

“This storm did not meaningfully change snowpack conditions or the water supply outlook,” Nathan Elder, water supply manager for Denver Water, said in an email. “It will keep reservoir storage from dropping further, but won’t add meaningful storage to reservoirs.”

To change the drought trajectory, Colorado would need sustained snowfall in the mountain areas that feed Denver’s water system.

“I think the big win is we are now approaching the worst year on record instead of being the worst on record,” DeFrates said.