About Sunshine Atlas
Sunshine Atlas answers one question: where, and when, is the weather good for a trip? Open a destination to see its twelve months, or paint the whole map by sunshine, warmth, cold, rain or snow for the month you have in mind. 3,833 destinations in 235 countries and territories, each with its own airport, from long-term climate normals. Free, no signup, no ads.
How the Sunshine Score worksWhat has changed →Open data & APIPrivacy
Why this exists
I kept trying to plan winter trips around sunshine and kept hitting the same two dead ends: listicles with no numbers behind them, and weather sites built to tell you about next Tuesday rather than next February. I wanted one map that answers "where is it sunny in November?" with data, so I built it.
There is no company behind the site, no content team and no sponsored placement. If a destination tops a ranking here, it is because the climate normals put it there: the working is on the methodology page, and the full dataset is there to score things your own way.
Where the data comes from
Temperature, rainfall, sunshine and the midday UV index are NASA POWER climate normals for 2001 to 2020; places, populations and coordinates come from GeoNames and OurAirports, and sea temperatures from Open-Meteo. Every number on every page is either a measurement from those sources or computed from them by a formula the methodology page sets out. Nothing in the dataset is estimated by hand or by a language model.
A destination makes the atlas only if it has its own airport, one per metropolitan area (London appears once, not five times), so every dot on the map and every page here is a trip you can actually take.
How far to trust it
The modelled sunshine hours are checked against the 410 cities where a national weather service publishes a recorder-measured figure: a correlation of 0.92 and a mean absolute error of 212 hours a year. Two places are weaker, and the methodology page says so plainly: the continental far north, where the model reads high, and the United States, where it reads about 200 hours low against an older reference. Treat the scores as a way to compare places and the tables as long-term averages, never as a forecast.
The map and the pages
The map is MapLibre on OpenFreeMap's vector tiles, the chart the sister atlases draw on, with its relief from the Tilezen terrain tiles; the dots, their names and their cards are this atlas's own data. Behind it, thousands of static pages in English and Japanese come out of one Node script, with no CMS and no database. Visits are counted anonymously by a script on this site's own server; the privacy page says exactly what it records.
The data itself is free: CSV and JSON under CC BY 4.0, with a DOI, mirrored on GitHub, Hugging Face, Kaggle and Zenodo. There is a free MCP endpoint so AI assistants can query the atlas, and an embeddable widget and a badge for every destination.
Mistakes and corrections
Spotted something off, a city in the wrong country or a number that does not look right? Write to ceoflightmussy@gmail.com. Fixes go into the data and reach every page and mirror on the next build, and the changelog keeps an honest record, the embarrassing ones included.
The name
The site launched as Sunshine Atlas at sunshineatlas.com on 8 July 2026, was Sunshine Map at thesunshinemap.com from 31 July and Destinations Map at destinationsmap.com from 19 September, and has been Sunshine Atlas again, at its first address, since 10 October 2026. It is the same atlas throughout: every old address still works and forwards to the same page here, and the dataset keeps its DOI.
Who makes it
Sunshine Atlas is made by one person, under the pseudonym Mr. Flightmussy. Every visible change lands in the changelog (with an RSS feed for new studies and dataset editions). Contact: ceoflightmussy@gmail.com.
I am the creator of the website Movie Scene Map. First of all, I want to thank all and each of you wherever in the world you come from.
Flightmussy Studio
A studio for interactive maps: Movie Scene Map, Castle Map, World Train Map and Sunshine Atlas.
studioflightmussy.com
The other atlases
Same maker, same method, different subject.
- World Train Map: every notable passenger railway on earth.
- Castle Map: castles, fortresses and palaces worldwide.
- Movie Scene Map: where films and series were shot.
Licences
The dataset: CC BY 4.0. Climate normals: NASA POWER, CC BY 4.0. Places: GeoNames, CC BY 4.0, and OurAirports, public domain. Sea temperatures: Open-Meteo, CC BY 4.0. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, each under its own licence and credited under it. Basemap: OpenFreeMap and OpenMapTiles, from OpenStreetMap data; relief: the Tilezen terrain tiles.
Featured in
The atlas has been written about, put on a front page and carried in newsletters since it launched.
Articles
Front pages
Newsletters
The full list, with a link to every piece
Written about by beSpacific, on the front page of MetaFilter, and carried by Quantum of Sollazzo, Ràfagas.
MetaFilter's logo comes from its own site; the others are set in type. Each trademark belongs to its owner.