About Sunshine Atlas
One person, one build script, and a stubborn question: where is it actually sunny?
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.
Sunshine Atlas is made by one person. I'm an independent developer; there's no company behind the site, no content team, and no sponsored placements. If a destination tops a ranking here, it's because the climate normals put it there — you can check the working on the methodology page and download the full dataset to score things your own way.
How it's built
The whole site is generated by one Node script from open data: NASA POWER climate normals (2001–2020), places from GeoNames and OurAirports, sea temperatures via Open-Meteo. Roughly 4,100 static pages, no CMS, no database, no tracking scripts, no cookies. The globe is hand-written WebGL. Every number on every page is either a measurement from those sources or computed from them by a formula documented on the methodology page — nothing in the dataset is estimated by hand or by a language model.
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's also a free MCP endpoint so AI assistants can query the atlas directly, and an embeddable widget plus a per-city badge on every destination page.
Mistakes and corrections
Spotted something off — a city in the wrong country, a number that doesn't smell right? Email me at albanzaja2@gmail.com. Fixes go into the data and flow out to every page and mirror on the next build. The changelog keeps an honest record, including the embarrassing ones.
Sister atlases
Same approach, different questions: TrainRouter (the world's great train routes), Castlemap, Beachmap and Detourmap.