Colorado Springs road crews will break out the liquid de-icer Thursday to treat some city streets before a snowstorm is expected to arrive.

The National Weather Service has issued a winter storm watch for the northern part of El Paso County beginning Thursday afternoon. Colorado Springs could start seeing snow during the afternoon before the forecast calls for more than 3 inches of snow during the night.

It will be the city’s first snow response in more than a month, since the storm that ended on Dec. 4, and follows several weeks of unseasonably warm temperatures.

“Our pothole trucks are working hard today. Our plow trucks will be working hard in the coming days. The crews shift from core function to core function as they need to,” said Corey Farkas, operations and maintenance division manager for the city’s Public Works Department.

Farkas said the city will deploy more than 50 trucks during the snowstorm response. The plows will start by repeatedly clearing the large priority roads that cross the city and only move on once the streets are consistently clear.

Neighborhood streets will not be plowed unless they receive more than 6 inches of snow.

Farkas said the city has been selective in the past about when to deploy the liquid de-icer. Its effectiveness depended on the weather conditions leading into the storm, but the city was also limited by its storage capacity. Until the last few years, Colorado Springs could only store 5,000 gallons at each of the public works vehicle barns.

“If we were to do that in an anti-icing capacity prior to the storm hitting, we would deplete all of our liquids prior to the event getting there. And we utilize those in conjunction with the ice slicer on our priority routes,” Farkas said.

The city added multiple 24,000-gallon tanks in the Briargate area in northern Colorado Springs in recent years and is in the process of adding the same storage at the south end of town. Farkas said that storage will help make the magnesium chloride de-icer a more common treatment.

Between the de-icer and warm temperatures, the city expects that the snow will not begin to freeze on streets until Thursday night.

Meteorologist Alan Rose of Gazette news partner KOAA said Friday’s morning commute could be “pretty nasty,” as the winds and low temperatures turn the roads icy.

Come Friday night, Rose said skies will likely dry out, and temperatures will drop to the single digits and teens.

On Saturday, highs are forecast to be around 41 degrees, which is about 10 degrees above the average for January. Temperatures are expected to rise to around 52 degrees by Tuesday.

Eric Petersen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, blamed the recent stretch of warm weather on a La Niña weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean. La Niña tends to make the climate in southern Colorado warmer and drier, while favoring colder, snowier conditions in the northern mountains.

“We do get these extreme temperatures every now and then for this time of year, but it’s usually not as long,” Petersen said.

Gazette reporter Nick Smith contributed to this report.