It is shaping up to be the hottest week of the year in North Texas, according to recent forecasts from the National Weather Service.
The air temperature will be higher than 100 degrees every day this week, meteorologist Sarah Barnes of the National Weather Service (NWS) Fort Worth told The Dallas Express on Monday.
DFW endured 22 days of temperatures reaching 100 degrees or higher in 2023. The high on Sunday was 104 degrees.
“We’re going to be in the triple digits until rain chances return to the DFW area early next week,” Barnes told The Dallas Express. “There’s a slight chance it will dip below 100 on Sunday, but probably not.”
The record high temperature for July 31 was 106 degrees in 2012 and could be broken on Monday. The record high for August 1 of 107 degrees in 2011 might also be broken.
“We are forecasting 105 degrees to 107 degrees on both days,” Barnes said. “I do not think Wednesday will be as hot, but we will have to see.”
The hottest temperature so far in 2023 has been 108 degrees on July 18. The all-time record temperature in the DFW was 113 degrees on June 26-27, 1980, Barnes explained.
The longest consecutive stretch of 100-plus highs ran for 42 days — June 23 to August 3 — in 1980, Barnes added. The most 100-degree days in one year, 71, happened in 2011.
The 100-degree heat could be problematic in August as students return to school, Barnes said. Football and band practices start back up, and kids will be waiting in the hot weather for school buses.
“My advice is to avoid activity in the peak of the day,” Barnes said. “Stay hydrated. Wear light clothing. Take frequent breaks in the air conditioning.”
Extreme heat has been impacting agriculture, manufacturing, and construction, not just in Texas but nationwide.
The New York Times reported that more than 2.5 billion man-hours were lost to heat in 2021, and the figures have increased since then.
“We’ve known for a very long time that human beings are very sensitive to temperature, and that their performance declines dramatically when exposed to heat,” labor economist R. Jisung Park of the University of Pennsylvania told NYT. “And what we are learning is that hotter temperatures appear to muck up the gears of the economy in many more ways than we would have expected.”
Nearly 40% of the U.S. population currently faces heat advisories, according to the NWS.
President Joe Biden claimed extreme heat was the No.1 weather-related killer in the United States, citing federal data.
“Even those places that are used to extreme heat have never seen it as hot as it is now for as long as it’s been,’’ Biden said last week, according to AP News.
