BrianW

Anyone else notice the huge jump today in fuel prices? Heating oil went up 50 cents today to $5.50 a gallon and diesel was selling for over $6 a gallon in Fairfield County today when I was driving through.

Hopefully everyone can experience a real Iowa summer with truly spectacular dews. I have family on the Iowa/Missouri border and was there last July for this special stretch....

Measage me come harvest time. Any others interested in some hit me up as well. Always love sharing the harvest.

What a growing season. Just hit almost 40 continuous days above freezing. Spectacular early flowers this year...

1.5 for Branford. A friend in New Haven right by exit 8 on 91 where the big crash was measured 2.2 inches.

That was a sick streamer. It's still going strong here as well.

Friend said there is over 2 inches just north of New Haven and roads are a mess. Looks like the Southbury crew has been under it as well.

There's been a heavy lake effect streamer over New Haven for hours. Woke up to an inch or so on the ground.

Connecticut is going to suspended the 25 cent excise tax on gas for 3 months. Connecticut motorists should start seeing relief at the pump in early April with the General Assembly on Wednesday overwhelming approving a three-month suspension of the state’s 25-cent-per-gallon excise tax.

Yeah. Upton has 1-2 inches here. Rainfall totals look to be around 3/4 of an inch well inland, to about an 1 1/2 inches across the majority of the region, with an additional quarter inch of so possible Thursday night. Thus a storm total of about 1 to 2 inches is forecast for this system over a long duration of over 30 hours.

Danbury +8.0 New Haven +5.6 Groton +4.3 Bridgeport +3.6

Its all about the soil temperatures which are currently like +15 over the 10 year average and +10 over the 5 year average. The last real sustained cold here was back in late February.

Nice memorial you did for your companion. That is our rescue pup from Georgia Woody. We got him when he was 5 months old and he will be 2 years old in June. He's a Chihuahua/Dachshund mix and absolutely loves laying in the sun.

Your probably a bit warmer there in SW CT. You have tons of stuff growing and blooming as well? The daffodils are going to be flowering in another week or so here. Skunk cabbage came up about 2 weeks ago which is insanely early.

It was a live view from this morning from my ring camera. I had the patio put in last fall and that darker grass is kbg sod I installed last year. Its still a little dormant. I live a few hundred feet from the shoreline and we were recently reclassified to climate zone 4. I had some cold hearty herbs on the deck that grew almost all winter.

Crazy early spring underway here. Forsythia blooming and daffodils and other bulbs are coming up. Seems about 2-3 weeks early. Haven't been below freezing in almost 2 weeks and HVN is +5.2 MTD. First cut happening today and I have a ton of weeds to pull under my deck.

I use organic Milorganite but was just reading that fertilizer prices have skyrocketed. Russia is the world's largest producer. Now might be a good time to stock up on all your fertilizer. The Green Markets North American Fertilizer Index, already high, jumped 16% last Friday. Urea, a major fertilizer ingredient, went up 22%. Potash, another major ingredient (Russia is the top producer), increased 34% in Brazil, the world’s leading fertilizer importer. The price for standard “starter fertilizer” 10-34-0 is up 49% from a year ago and likely to go much higher.

I read its also estimated to cost like $13 million per mile for a large natural gas transmission line to be run to New England. The permits alone will never happen as NY and all of the New England states have legislation to reduce carbon emissions by like 80% by 2050. New England would be better off spending billions on more wind and solar than a gas pipeline. I don't think people realize how much potential offshore wind is possible in New England. Even factoring in converting everything to heat pumps we would have 5x the electricity we need in New England. New England could generate more than five times its projected 2050 electricity demand with offshore wind alone. Massachusetts has the potential to generate the most offshore wind power of any state, while Maine has by far the highest ratio of potential offshore wind power to its current and future electricity needs. For projections of 2050 electricity demand, the report assumes that U.S. buildings, industry and transportation will all be powered by electricity rather than fossil fuels by mid-century. https://environmentmassachusetts.org/news/mae/new-report-new-england-has-vast-potential-offshore-wind-energy

You can track the real time fuels and prices at ISO New Englands website. https://www.iso-ne.com/ Oil is still used on extremely cold days and hot high demand days in the summer. There are oil fired peaker power plants that sit idle most of the year and will turn on when the price of wholesale electricity goes sky high. During a cold snap I did the math and the New Haven oil plant was getting like 20x the normal wholesale power rate. The plant was making a few million in one day at those rates.

Great article explaining it. Why Is New England Paying The Equivalent Of $180 Oil For Natural Gas? The gas that lands in Boston has historically been sourced from fields in Trinidad & Tobago, Norway, and Russia. https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2022/02/01/why-is-new-england-paying-the-equivalent-of-180-oil-for-natural-gas/

Imagine if we had these prices in Jan Feb. The cheapest Heating oil at the New Haven terminal is $4.99 a gallon right now. New England prices on cash heating oil right.

The billboard I drive by that has the price listed everyday had $4.24 a gallon this morning. It was like $3.49 a week ago. Natural gas prices are up 60% in Europe and that is going to have a huge impact here. I can guarantee we are going to be sending tanker after tanker of LNG to Europe to cut off as much gas from Russia. The Natural gas futures for the summer in New England are sky high as well. Huge electricity rate increases are almost certain when utilities adjust to summer rates in June.

I posted a few weeks ago about all the military traffic here along the shoreline. Blackhawks formations flying really low at weird times like at like 5 am. It looks like either a big training exercise or we are on high alert. Im going to guess its not training. There are c-130s all over New England flying grids today and there is a Stratotanker going up and down the New England coast. You can track all the military traffic here when their transponders are on. Click U on the top right to show military traffic. Take a look at Europe right now. You can usually see all the flights into eastern Poland bringing supplies and the recon flights along the border. https://globe.adsbexchange.com/

Drones are going to play a big role. The Ukrainian's have been posting tons of videos using their Turkish Bayraktar TB2 with devastating effects against the Russian's. They supposedly wiped out out an entire column of Chechen fighters in one of the videos and have been hitting high value targets with it left and right. The guy who designed and its named after Selçuk Bayraktar went to MIT.