Wet and snowy weather in March helped boost snowpack levels in several major Colorado river basins closer to monthly averages.

Tony Tolsdorf, a hydrologist with the U-S Natural Resource Conservation Service, said that March has been a good month for snowpack.

At the beginning of the month, the amount of water stored in snowpack above the South Platte basin was 31 percent below average. By yesterday, it was within about 20 percent of the basin's three-decade average for March 28. March is traditionally the snowiest month of the season in the mountains.

Tolsdorf cautioned that the data obtained by electronic sensing equipment are preliminary. Field crews that manually validate the data might adjust the estimates when their reports are filed early next week.

The remote-sensing stations also showed that the Arkansas Basin had a wet March, with stored-water estimates moving from 79 percent of average on March 1 to 95 percent of average in late March.

The Rio Grande basin did even better with snowpack totals of 110 percent of average through Wednesday, figures show.