Foothills County saw some light flurries on Tuesday, with a bit of accumulating snow overnight, which has all but disappeared by the following afternoon.

It was a different story just a bit further north, with Calgarians having to deal with a thick sheet of heavy snow.

Environment & Climate Change Canada Meteorologist Sarah Hoffman says the Calgary airport reported 22 centimetres, a stark contrast to the light dusting just a few minutes to the south.

"There was a huge dichotomy between observations, we had anywhere from a skiff of snow, about 2 centimetres, to 30 centimetres at the end of it."

The municipality that got the worst of it was Cochrane, with a reported 27 centimetres, with power outages and a travel advisory issued by Cochrane RCMP.

A low-pressure system was behind the snowfall, which has since drifted east into Saskatchewan.

The consistency of the snow was due to the atmospheric temperature, says Hoffman.

"It had bands of convective snow. That's a fancy term to mean that it was highly localized and very heavy precipitation. What you could think of that is in the summertime when we have patchy thunderstorms or bands of rain, it's a very similar situation, it's just that because it was colder in this synoptic situation it came as snow, but in the summertime or later in the spring those would be thunderstorms or bands of heavy rain."

There's another chance of flurries tonight (April 20) and into tomorrow, and beyond that, temperatures will be rising to above ten degrees.

Daytime precipitation would come as rain once it's that warm, though flurries could still develop overnight, with snow having been recorded with temperatures as high as five degrees.

When it comes to April snow, Hoffman says it's not all that unusual to see, with 19 centimetres of snow in April on average from 1981 to 2010.