Weather News

Dallas wins No. 1 top honor on list of hottest cities in U.S. this week

Hat tip to Fire of Love, the 2022 documentary by Sara Dosa, for this fiery image.

Photo courtesy of Image'Est

Texas wins this week with three cities earning top slots on a list of the hottest cities in the U.S. for June 27.

According to The Washington Post, Dallas was the No. 1 most hottest city for the day, followed by Fort Worth and Austin. San Antonio and Houston came in on the list at No. 5 and No. 6.

Perhaps it's no coincidence that all five of those cities also have their own local CultureMap bureaus? #hot #buzzy

Wednesday, June 28 is expected to get even hotter. The National Weather Service issued an excessive heat advisory for Dallas, Collin, Denton, and Tarrant counties, though 8 pm Wednesday. Dallas is supposed to reach 107 degrees, with a heat index of 115 degrees.

As Ben Noll, a meteorologist with New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research, tweeted, Texas will be hotter on June 28 than 99 percent of the rest of the world, including the Sahara Desert and the Persian Gulf.

The cause — and also the buzzy hot weather phrase for 2023 — is a "Heat Dome." A heat dome is where hot air gets trapped into a certain space. The Associated Press says it occurs when “stationary high pressure with warm air combines with warmer than usual air in the Gulf of Mexico and heat from the sun that is nearly directly overhead.”

During late June, Dallas usually averages 93 degrees.

Climate scientist Andrew Pershing says that what makes this heat wave unusual is how long it has lasted, stating, "There have been places in Texas that have had more than two weeks of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which are just really unusual temperatures for this time of year even in a region that is used to heat."

But the year 2022 was also bad, with many cities across South Texas experiencing the hottest May on record.

Texas is coming on strong for breaking records in 2023, besting record-breakers from prior years such as the Pacific Northwest which experienced record-breaking heat waves in 2022, and Reno, which had the hottest night in history in July 2022.

According to ABC13 in Houston, Wednesday will be the 16th day in a row with some kind of heat-related weather alert for southeast Texas. In Austin, the heat index hit 116 degrees on June 15, the highest on record for the city. Other Texas cities have already broken records this year, including Del Rio, San Angelo, and Laredo.

It's not just Texas: A story inThe Guardian notes that nearby states including New Mexico, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kansas, and Missouri are also experiencing scorching heat, with the National Weather Service predicting temperatures to rise further and stay this way through the 4th of July.

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Coworking News

New-style coworking concept Switchyards from Atlanta to open in Dallas

Switchyards

A new kind of shared workspace is coming to Dallas: Called Switchyards, it's an Atlanta based chain that calls itself "the world’s first neighborhood work club," and it will open in Oak Cliff at 610 N. Tyler St., in the space most previously occupied by Boxwood Hospitality (Cliff House), and Good Shepherd Church, which is moving to Wax Space.

According to a statement, it'll open on August 25.

Switchyards was founded in 2019 by CEO Michael Tavani with a goal of creating “a place in your neighborhood purpose-built to sit with your laptop, grab a coffee, and get some good work done.” There are currently 29 locations including a dozen around Atlanta, plus locations across the southeast. There's also a location in Austin, which opened in mid-June.

They describe themselves as a combination of a coffee shop, college library, and boutique hotel lobby, located in residential neighborhoods. Unlike some other co-working concepts that are in business areas requiring a commute, Switchyards strives to be within 10 minutes of its members' homes.

Each club features a bustling coffee shop look and feel, with quiet areas for focused work, and bookable conference rooms and phone booths for meetings.

Notably, it’s open 24/7, and has free coffee with a cost — $100 a month — that's more like a gym membership. You're given a key and can enter whenever you want. Rather than renting offices, it's a place to go to for a few hours of focused work around others. And members get access to every Switchyards location.

They have some groundrules that include not moving the furniture, no eating full meals (they say the smells and the mess create a negative experience for everyone else in the club), no work stations, and no calls, meetings, speakerphone, or zooms in public spaces.

Memberships are generally limited and supposedly sell out quickly.

They just opened a location in Austin in mid-June; Switchyards Creative Director Brandon Hinman said “It’s almost like a Ritz-Carlton and a dive bar had a baby. It does have that luxe feel, it does feel generous, it does feel dialed in, but it also has a little bit of ‘Cheers’ to it, a little bit of that neighborhood pub to it, and that’s the balance we’re trying to hit.”

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