UPDATE: Early blizzard warning covers most of state

No matter if anyone’s been naughty or nice this year, the Upper Midwest is expecting a big lump of coal in the form of serious Christmastime weather.
With the exception of some counties in the southeast, the state of North Dakota is looking to a blizzard warning starting at noon Christmas day. The area that’s been spared from the warning, a stretch from Fargo to Lisbon, N.D., is under a winter storm watch.
Bill Barrett, a meteorologist in the Grand Forks office of the National Weather Service, said Saturday the earliness of the warning “presents higher confidence of something happening.”
“This one has been coming along and has been pretty consistent,” Barrett said of tracking the storm. “There doesn’t seem to be a back-door way out of this, but we’ll just have to see.”
Grand Forks residents might start their Christmas morning with not-so-festive freezing drizzle. From about noon on, Barrett said, conditions likely will deteriorate.
Wind speeds could increase to about 25 mph by the early afternoon and pick up to sustained highs of 35 mph, punctuated by gusts upward of 50 mph.
The afternoon also will give way to an increasingly white Christmas. The National Weather Service advised holiday travelers to plan accordingly for what could amount to up to a foot of snow in the Grand Forks area, a level also predicted for a diagonal band stretching from Roseau, Minn., to Valley City, N.D.
Farther north and west, even more snow is forecast. Residents from Langdon and Cavalier in the north down to Devils Lake and New Rockford could see as much as 18 inches of snow dumped from Sunday evening through Monday morning. Most of the snow in eastern North Dakota and northwest Minnesota probably will fall from 3 to 9 p.m. Christmas Day. The worst of the wind, plus more snow, is expected in early to mid-Monday morning.
Looking south, travelers can expect less snow -- with the possibility of up to a half-foot -- along a line extending from Lisbon, N.D., to Fosston, Minn.
That area likely will be hit mostly with precipitation in the form of a wintry mix with sleet accumulation.
For the most part, Barrett said, the blizzard will be a “Sunday evening until Monday morning event.”
“There could be a lull in there, but it’s not going to mean much,” he said, given that increasing wind speeds after 3 p.m. likely will slash visibility to minimum levels. Depending on location, reindeer-drawn sleighs -- and motorists -- likely will contend with drifting snow as northerly winds pick up throughout Sunday.
In Grand Forks, city road crews are scheduled to work through the holiday to keep the streets clear.
“We’re going to come in and work both tomorrow and Monday,” said Mark Aubol, the city's streets and facilities manager, on Christmas Eve. “Our whole department will be showing up for work -- it’s just one of those hazards of the job, we know we have to be here.”
Aubol said all 33 road workers in the department will be on the job, depending on need. He hoped on Saturday for gentler winds to facilitate the plowing effort throughout the rest of the holiday weekend.
Road workers pretreated the main thoroughfares of Grand Forks on Thursday and Friday, Aubol said, taking advantage of warming temperatures and melting snowpack to break up ice and clear roadways down to the pavement as much as possible. Heading into the storm, he said the roads are in “pretty good shape,” though there are still some areas where snow is crowding the roadways. The addition of a foot or more of fresh snow could “really congest some of the berms and corners,” Aubol said.
“We couldn’t get to all of them before this one hit but, hopefully, we’ll get by it OK,” he added.
Though the timing of the blizzard is unfortunate for the crews, Aubol said it’s far from the first instance of a major cleanup effort aligning with Christmastime. He recalled workers just a few years ago “going pretty steady” throughout the entirety of the holiday season -- from before Christmas Eve and into the new year.
“It’s happened a few times in the years I’ve worked with the city, where you miss the holidays because we’re working,” Aubol said. “But when you get done with your shift, you try to spend some time with your family.”