City plays away first 100-degree day
‘You can tell the difference’: Temperatures reach into triple digits after scorching week
At Burnett Bayland Park in Gulfton, Juan Castillo and his family relaxed Sunday afternoon in the shade of an oak tree.
“The sun stings a lot,” said Castillo, who was playing around with his cousins and a soccer ball. “You feel the pressure of the heat hitting you, and you’re like, ‘Damn, it’s hot.’”
Sunday’s temperatures — which reached 100 degrees by mid-afternoon — weren’t anything to mess with: Houston saw triple-digit weather for the first time in 2018.
The mercury slipped up to 100 degrees at 3:35 p.m., said Katie Magee, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service. That was the reading at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, considered the official temperature for the city of Houston.
It didn’t stay there long — by 3:40 p.m., the temperature had dipped back down to 99 — but Houston was still flirting with 100 degrees at 7 p.m., even as the sun started to set.
Castillo’s cousins had cooled off at the park’s splash pad, drenching themselves with streams of cold water. Older relatives sat in lawn chairs near a hot metal picnic table.
Castillo said he’s out in the heat every day, but Sunday was different.
“Yesterday, I was riding my bike all day and it was all right,” he said. “Today, it burns. You can tell the difference. You stand there for two minutes and you feel like, ‘I can’t do this — I’m out.’”
Houston might see another 100-degree day on Monday: The
National Weather Service issued a heat advisory from noon to 9 p.m., predicting high temperatures between 98 and 104 degrees.
The city hasn’t seen triple-digit heat since July 29, 2017, when the afternoon high topped out at 100.
High temperatures are pretty typical for mid-summer, of course. But the sort of heat Houston saw Sunday is specifically caused by a high-pressure system at the upper levels of the atmosphere.
“That often suppresses our wind, so it makes it feel a lot hotter,” Magee said.
Right about the time the temperature hit 100 degrees, Morgan and Mitchell Maples were standing in the sun at the Danny Jackson Family Bark Park. They’d brought Maggie, their German shepherd mix, and the neighbor’s labradoodle, Barley, to the dog park.
The pups were running in and out of a small pool, their coats soaked. Even Maggie, who doesn’t like getting wet, was willing to get her paws in the pool.
Splashing in the cold pool helps the dogs power through their playtime, Morgan Maples said. “Otherwise they only make it like 15 minutes — and then we go, because they’re miserable.”
The dogs might have found some relief, but their humans were planning to go inside soon.
“We drove here in air conditioning, and we’re going back to air conditioning,” Garcia said.
Some good news for everyone trying to make it through this heat: There’s a cold front coming down from the northwest this week.
It’ll only drop the high temperatures into the mid- to upper 90s, Magee said. But the front also will bring a blanket of clouds that will keep the heat from being quite so intense.
So the coming week will still be brutally hot, Magee said — but “our heat index values will not be up to those advisory levels.”
The Taqueria Chiquita truck was parked at Burnett Bayland Park on Sunday afternoon, offering sweet relief in the form of bottled water, Gatorade, lemonade, snow cones and bags of cold fruit.
“Right now is the hottest hour,” said Milagro Amaya, whose family has owned the business for more than 20 years.
They’re selling a lot, but sometimes they give water, Gatorade or ice pops to joggers or kids who seem overwhelmed by the heat.
As she waited for the sun to set and temperatures to drop, she shared her advice for dealing with the heat.
“Water and Gatorade — that’s the way to go,” she said. “Eating here and there, and trying to stay in the shade.”