The Sunshine Map dataset
Everything behind this site's rankings, free to download: 3,833 destinations × 12 months of Sunshine Scores, temperatures, rainfall, midday UV index and sea temperature, from long-term climate normals. Every destination has its own airport — that's the selection rule.
Downloads
| File | What's inside | Size |
|---|---|---|
| sunshine-atlas-destinations.csv | One row per destination — coordinates, population, climate band, annual sunshine hours, peak midday UV index, and the 0–100 Sunshine Score for the year and every month. Nine metros hold a second row for their second airport; duplicate_of_iata names the primary so they can be filtered out. | 594 KB |
| sunshine-atlas-monthly-climate.csv | One row per destination-month (45,996 rows) — Sunshine Score, average day high and night low °C, rainfall mm, typical midday UV index, and sea temperature °C where coastal. | 1,748 KB |
| sunshine-atlas-destinations.json | The full dataset as one JSON array — all fields from both CSVs, monthly values as arrays. | 2,617 KB |
Field dictionary
- sunshine_score_* — the 0–100 Sunshine Score: daytime warmth × dryness × annual sunshine, from long-term climate normals. Not a forecast.
- day_high_c / night_low_c — monthly average daytime high and night-time low, °C.
- rain_mm — monthly precipitation normal. annual_rainfall_mm — those twelve summed. sea_temp_c — monthly mean sea-surface temperature, coastal destinations only, from a single year (2024) rather than a normal.
- midday_uv_index — the typical midday UV index that month on the WHO scale (0–2 low, 3–5 moderate, 6–7 high, 8–10 very high, 11+ extreme). peak_midday_uv_index — the highest of a destination's twelve. Derived from NASA POWER's all-sky surface UV over the same 2001–2020 period, rescaled from POWER's 24-hour mean to the midday value; the methodology page gives the rescaling and its validation.
- annual_sunshine_hours — bright-sunshine hours per year, modelled from NASA POWER's clearness index (see methodology); not a met-service observation. climate / destination_type — Köppen-derived band and the atlas's destination classification.
- iata — the destination's primary airport, one per metro area; join key across files.
- duplicate_of_iata — empty for almost every row. It is set on the nine second airports whose metro already has a row (Southend alongside Heathrow for London, Prestwick alongside Glasgow, Paine Field alongside Seattle, and six more), and its value is the primary's
iata. Filter onduplicate_of_iatabeing empty to get exactly one row per place. Both rows are real: each carries the climate of its own coordinates, which is why the pair rarely agrees exactly.
License & citation
Free for any use — research, journalism, apps — under CC BY 4.0: credit Sunshine Map and link to thesunshinemap.com/data/.
Suggested citation: Sunshine Map (2026). Monthly sunshine scores and climate normals for 3,833 destinations. Edition 2026.11. thesunshinemap.com/data/ · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21322408
Mirrors: GitHub · Hugging Face · Kaggle · Zenodo (DOI, archived) — the files here are always the current build.
Upstream sources: temperature, rainfall, sunshine and midday UV index from NASA POWER climatology, 2001–2020 (CC BY 4.0); places and populations © GeoNames & OurAirports (CC BY); elevations from the Copernicus DEM via Open-Meteo; sea temperatures via Open-Meteo Marine (CC BY 4.0). Every upstream source permits commercial reuse, so this dataset's CC BY 4.0 grant carries no hidden conditions — pass those credits along and you're done. The Sunshine Score itself is documented on the methodology page.
The dataset regenerates with every site build; the files above always match the published rankings. Spotted an oddity? Email me or open an issue on the GitHub mirror — corrections flow back into the site and every mirror. The changelog records them.
Prefer querying to downloading? The same dataset is exposed as a free MCP server for AI assistants — live sunshine rankings, per-destination climate cards and comparisons, no key required.
Put this widget on your site
A live "where's sunny this month" ranking that refreshes itself each month — free to embed under CC BY 4.0. Paste this wherever you'd like it to appear:
Live preview — this is exactly what your readers see: