Changelog

What has changed on this atlas and in its data, newest first, including the things that turned out to be wrong. Data corrections also flow to the open dataset and its mirrors.

About the atlasMethodologyOpen dataPrivacy

• 11 October 2026

  No Google Analytics, and no cookie

  • Google Analytics is gone from the site. The pages had loaded it since 16 September, and it counted every visit a second time for Google. Nothing here needed it: the site's own anonymous counting, on its own server in the EU, stays, and stores nothing on your device. So the site now sets no cookie at all; the one thing it keeps on your device is the light or dark theme you chose.
  • The cookies it left are cleared. If your browser still holds Google Analytics' _ga cookies from this site, they are deleted on your next visit, and following an old link to destinationsmap.com or thesunshinemap.com deletes the ones kept there. The privacy page lost the section that described Google Analytics and says what Google still holds.
• 10 October 2026

  Sunshine Atlas again, on a flat map

  • The site is Sunshine Atlas again, at sunshineatlas.com. It launched under that name and at that address on 8 July, was Sunshine Map from 31 July and Destinations Map from 19 September. Every old address forwards to the same page here, the dataset keeps its DOI, and the MCP endpoint still answers at the old addresses too.
  • The map is flat now. The globe is gone: the destinations sit on the chart the sister atlases use, a night chart and a day chart that follow the theme switch, with relief in the mountains and the names of the places on the dots as you zoom. Every destination is on the screen at once, nothing hides behind the planet, and the Pacific can be crossed from Japan to Hawaii in one drag. Zooming, panning and pinching are MapLibre's own, the same as on World Train Map, Castle Map and Movie Scene Map.
  • The panel is Movie Scene Map's. On a computer it is one sheet down the left: the name, the count, the flags of the two editions, the search box, Browse, Surprise me and About in a row, then Paint the map and the filters under two headings. On a phone a bar carries the name and a button that opens the layers and the filters, with the search box and the three buttons under it in one row. The search finds countries as well as destinations: choose a country and the map frames its destinations.

  More details (5)

  • A destination's card is laid out like Movie Scene Map's. Its photograph at its own shape across the top, a chip in the dot's own colour for the kind of place and one for its climate, the name, the country, the population and the airport traffic, Best time to visit as the red button, then the year in figures and the twelve months as before. On a phone it is a sheet at the foot of the screen.
  • Paint the map keeps its five layers and its months. Sunny, Warm, Cold, Rain and Snow paint every dot as they did on the globe, and the legend and the months sit at the foot of the map. On the day chart each layer has deeper colours of its own: the night colours were made to glow on near-black, and they fade on paper.
  • A new logo. A sun in the site's red beside the name; in the browser tab, the same sun in white on the night blue.
  • About and this page are laid out like Movie Scene Map's. About says who makes the atlas and lists where it has been featured, and every change on this page has a title of its own.
  • Two more companies on the privacy page. The flat map's chart and its fonts come from OpenFreeMap, and the shading of its mountains from the Tilezen terrain tiles, which Amazon Web Services hosts. Your browser fetches both directly, so the privacy notice now names them. The satellite pictures the globe was drawn with are no longer used.
• 6 October 2026

  The coffee cat visits

  • The coffee cat visits. The cat with the Buy me a coffee sign no longer flies in as the map opens and stays at its foot. It now comes two minutes after the map has opened, is there for thirty seconds, and leaves the way it came: it turns round and pushes its sign back out to the left. Ten minutes after it has left it comes again, for thirty seconds again, and so on for as long as the map stays open. The entry of 2 October said it flies in when the map opens; this clock replaces that. The cat on Movie Scene Map keeps the same clock.
  • Minutes of the map on your screen. While the map sits in a tab you are not looking at, the clock stands still, so the cat does not come and go unseen. It is not taken from under you either: if you are moving your pointer over the sign when the thirty seconds are up, the cat waits until the pointer has moved off or lain still for a few seconds, and if you followed the sign to Buy Me a Coffee, it is still there with its cup when you come back and leaves a few seconds later.
  • What stays as it was. A press on the cat sends it away at once, and a cat sent away by hand does not come back until the map is loaded again. A gust still moves it, once in the middle of each visit, and where the legend of Paint the globe sits at the foot of the screen the sign still flies above it. With reduced motion set in your browser the sign appears and disappears without flying. Nothing is stored about any of this: the clock is a timer in the page, and it starts again with every load.
  • What it does not do. On a phone an open destination card still covers the sign, so a visit of the cat can pass behind it unseen. Whoever wants the page at another moment finds the same link at the foot of every page.
• 2 October 2026

  A flying cat with a coffee sign

  • A flying cat with a coffee sign. At the foot of the map there is now a purple button that says Buy me a coffee, and a ginger cat tows it there the way a small plane tows a banner. The cat is Mr. Flightmussy, and the same cat flies on Movie Scene Map. It flies in from the left when the map opens, a gust moves it now and then, it rolls when you press the button, and when you come back from the page the button opened it is holding a cup. At rest nothing moves, and with reduced motion set in your browser nothing moves at all.
  • Press the cat instead and it turns round and pushes its sign back out the way it came, so the globe is left clear for anyone who would rather not have it there. Nothing is remembered: the cat is back the next time the map opens. Where the legend of Paint the globe sits at the foot of the screen, the sign flies above it.
  • The button opens the maker's page on Buy Me a Coffee in a new tab, and the link at the foot of every page leads to the same page. The words on the button are the same in English and in Japanese, because they are the name of the service. It takes cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay without an account. Nothing on this site loads from Buy Me a Coffee: the button is an ordinary link, so that company learns of a visit only when someone follows it, and its own widget was left out for that reason. The privacy notice says so. PayPal, linked until 28 September, does not come back.
  • What it does not do. On a phone an open destination card covers the button until it is closed. And the cup means thank you for looking: the site cannot know whether anything was given, and it does not try to find out.
• 28 September 2026

  No more Partnership or Donate buttons, and a white tab icon

  • The Partnership and Donate buttons are gone, and so is the note in the corner. The map's panel has three buttons now, Browse, Surprise me and About, spread across its row, and on a phone About sits alone under the two large ones. The partnership page is gone, the footer of every page no longer carries a Donate link, and nothing on the site asks for money. The privacy notice says what became of the one value the note kept in your browser.
  • A white tab icon. The pin in the browser tab and on a phone's home screen is white now, on the site's own night blue, instead of red. The logo on the pages stays red.
• 23 September 2026

  A Japanese edition, every photograph looked at, and the sister atlases’ panel

  • Destinations Map is in Japanese. 日本語版 is a whole edition, not a translated sidebar: the globe, every destination, country and continent page, the rankings, the best-time guides, About and the methodology, each at the same address with /ja/ in front. The places carry the names Japanese Wikipedia and Wikidata give them, read rather than translated, so Rome is ローマ and Tokyo is 東京; a place with no Japanese name keeps its English one. A row of flags in the map's panel, and a flag square on a phone, switch between the two editions, as on the sister atlases. The privacy notice, the comparisons and the data studies stay in English.
  • Every destination's photograph was looked at, and the poor ones were replaced. The photographs are chosen from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons by a program, and a program can read a file's name, its size and its categories but not what the picture shows. So all 3,298 of them were looked at, as Castle Map's were. 169 had to go: satellite images, airport charts, black-and-white archive photographs, collages, pictures of somewhere else (Chaoyang was showing Jinzhou), and pictures of things that are not places at all (a bird for Lakeba, a lump of the metal for Platinum, Alaska). 405 more were poor. Each of those, and each destination with no photograph, was set beside up to five other photographs of the place, and the best was chosen. 360 destinations have a better photograph now, 174 that had none have one, and 64 whose only pictures were of those kinds show none rather than a wrong one.
  • The photograph at the top of a page is no longer cut to a strip. On a wide screen it was cropped to a band more than two and a half times as wide as it was tall, taken from the middle of the picture, which cut the tops off towers and the beach off seaside towns. It is now 16:9, under the page's title, and where a picture's subject sits high or low in the frame the crop moves to it: 254 photographs are framed that way. A photograph smaller than the column is shown at its own size instead of being stretched past what it holds.

  More details (7)

  • The destination pages were laid out again, the way the sister atlases lay out theirs. On a wide screen the text runs down the left, and beside it are the destination's figures at a glance (sunshine hours, the sunniest month, its score, rain, UV, the sea, population and elevation) with the nearby places for sunshine under them. The questions and answers that every page carried for search engines are now on the page for anyone to open, the nearest destinations are cards with their photographs, and the foot of each page leads to the previous and next destination in the same country. The code for putting a destination's badge on your own site folds away until you want it. The best-time-to-visit guides open with a photograph and show their sunniest places as cards.
  • The map's panel now matches the sister atlases', on a computer and on a phone. It has a Partnership button between About and Donate, and the note in the corner no longer asks for a donation: like the notes on World Train Map, Castle Map and Movie Scene Map, it says Destinations Map is looking for partnerships and sponsorships, and its Learn more button opens a new page that describes what a partnership can look like. The Donate buttons stay where they were, and the privacy notice says what the note stores, which has not changed.
  • Behind many of the missing photographs was a fault in the program that finds them: when Wikipedia asked it to slow down, it wrote the answer down as "no such article". That is fixed, and the choices made in the review now stand: a later run can no longer swap a chosen photograph back for a rejected one.
  • The map's panel is laid out like its sister atlases'. The name and the count of destinations sit at the top with the night-and-day switch beside them, the search box comes next, and Browse, Surprise me, About and Donate share one row beneath it. Paint the globe and the filters fold away under two headings; while a filter hides destinations, a dot on its heading says so and one button shows everything again. On a phone, a bar across the top carries the name, the count and a button that opens the search and the filters, and the four buttons stay in view just under it.
  • The map suits an iPhone better. In Safari on an iPhone the globe is now drawn on under the clock at the top of the screen and under the floating toolbar at its foot, instead of stopping short of both and leaving a blank band behind the glass at each end, while the panel, the globe's centre, its buttons and its cards stay on the part of the screen you can see. A tapped button no longer flashes grey, a quick double tap on one counts as two taps rather than a zoom, tapping the search box no longer zooms the page on an iPad either, and the cards scroll without a scroll bar.
  • A destination's card on a phone shows whole. It was held to a little over half the screen, so a card with its photograph and its twelve months was cut off at the bottom and had to be scrolled inside itself. It may now use all the room under the bar at the top, as the cards on Castle Map do, and while it reaches up that far the buttons under the bar step out of its way.
  • On a phone with both folds of the panel open, the links at its foot were printed over the last of the filters. They sit under the filters again.
• 19 September 2026

  Destinations Map: a new name, a red logo and a smoother globe

  • A new name and address: Destinations Map, at destinationsmap.com. The site was Sunshine Map, at thesunshinemap.com. Every old link forwards to the same page here, the dataset keeps its DOI, and the MCP endpoint still answers at its old address too. The name now says what the atlas is for — choosing where, and when, to go — rather than the one thing it measures.
  • A new logo and a colour of its own. The site is red now, the way the sister atlases are blue, green and gold: the logo, a pin on a folded map, and every button. The tab icon is the same red pin. The weather-family buttons and pills no longer wear a colour each, the emoji are gone from the whole site, and where a figure on the map's card needs a label it now has a plain line icon.
  • The map's card works the way the sister atlases' cards do. It follows the pointer and sits beside it instead of over the dot, so it never covers what you are pointing at. A click pins it where you clicked; with one pinned, pointing at another destination shows that one until you move off. While a card is up the other destinations dim. The ✕, Escape or a click on open globe closes it, and on a phone the card is a sheet at the foot of the screen. A click out at sea no longer opens the nearest destination.

  More details (2)

  • Every page's preview card for social media still said "Sunshine Atlas", the name before last. They were all redrawn with the new name.
  • The map moves more smoothly. A turn of the mouse wheel, the + and − buttons and a double-tap now glide to the new zoom instead of jumping to it, the way the sister atlases' maps do. On a phone, pinching and dragging hold a steady frame rate: the satellite tiles are decoded away from the page and added a few at a time, and the country borders outside the view are no longer drawn. A card no longer flashes up when a drag or a pinch starts on a destination; it opens when you tap.
• 17 September 2026

  A new card, one button style, and the imagery on our own server

  • The map's card was rebuilt. The photograph keeps its own shape instead of being cropped to a fixed band — the old crop took the sky off every coastal city — and the gradient that used to darken its foot is gone, so the picture is the picture. The photographer's name sits in the corner of it as a small plate, linking the file on Commons when the card is pinned, the destination's name is set at the size of a title rather than level with the numbers beside it, and the card now ends with a way through to that destination's own page. Until today it was a dead end: the site has a page for all 3,833 of them and the card linked to none.
  • One button style, and a fourth button. The panel's three doors out of the map wore three different looks — Browse in the brand blue, Surprise me in emerald, About as a dark plate — so a row of three related things read as three unrelated ones. They are one style now, which is what all three sister atlases settled on. Donate joins them, and sits in the footer of every page after Privacy. The sister-atlas line at the foot of the panel is set as a sentence instead of shouted in capitals with a name broken across two lines.
  • Google Analytics runs on the site, and it sets cookies. Its measurement is what an advertising network asks to see before it will look at a site, and this one intends to carry advertising. The privacy page says so plainly: which cookies, how long they last, what Google receives, and how to refuse them. The advertising uses are switched off in the configuration — no Google signals, no ad personalisation, no advertising identifiers — and the first-party counting described in point 2 of that page still stores nothing at all.

  More details (5)

  • A note asking for a donation appears once, then stays away for four hours. It remembers only the time you last dismissed it, and it writes nothing unless you answer it. There are no ads on the site today.
  • The globe's satellite imagery is now served from this site, not from someone else's. It used to come from Esri's tile service, fetched by your browser directly — the only third party this site contacted for anything but a photograph. It is now NASA's Blue Marble, mirrored here once and served from this domain. Nothing is lost at any zoom: that imagery runs to 500 m per pixel, which is exactly as far in as this globe goes.
  • Photographs now credit the photographer. Every destination photo comes from Wikimedia Commons, and most are licensed CC BY or CC BY-SA — licences that ask for the creator's name, the licence, and a link. The caption used to say only "photo via Wikimedia Commons", which names the host and none of the three. 3,408 photographs now name the person who took them, 3,536 name their licence, and all of them link the file. Where Commons states no author, the page says so rather than inventing one.
  • The privacy page's list of other organisations your browser contacts is accurate again: the globe's imagery is off it and Google is on it.
  • Sister-atlas links pointed at two domains that had since been renamed — they worked only because the old names redirect. Fixed.
• 30 July 2026

  US sunshine hours run about 213 hours low

  • US sunshine hours run about 213 hours low, and the methodology page now says so. Checking the model against the 52 US cities that publish a recorder-measured figure gives a bias of −213 hours and a mean absolute error of 230 hours, with 47 of the 52 reading low. The published +24-hour bias is a global average that hid it: outside the US the same model runs +69 hours. The miss scales with moisture (correlation −0.56 with annual rainfall), so the arid West is close (Boise −4, El Paso +13) while the humid East is not (Milwaukee −534, Miami −501, Boston −477, Cleveland −460). The tempting explanation — a recorder counting sunshine between summer cumulus that a coarse satellite cell averages away — does not survive the check that matters: the same climate bands outside the US barely show the effect, with humid-subtropical cities at −249 hours in the US against −18 hours elsewhere. Cloud physics does not stop at a border, so the asymmetry points at the reference data, most likely because the published US figures descend largely from NOAA's historical sunshine network, which was down to roughly 160 stations by the early 1980s and is no longer a current product. China (−175) and Japan (−133) are the next-largest one-sided gaps, which fits. Unresolved. Until it is, treat US sunshine hours as carrying roughly a 200-hour uncertainty and prefer the station figure where one exists. Rankings are unaffected, because the atlas uses one consistent method throughout, and the Europe-versus-US comparison survives being recomputed entirely from published station numbers. No values were changed.
• 29 July 2026

  The far north is wrong, and dataset edition 2026.11

  • The far north is wrong, and the methodology page now says so. Above the Arctic Circle the sunshine model returns a median of about 2,130 hours a year, more than it gives the band beneath it and more than much of the mid-latitudes, which cannot be right. Maritime places come out sensibly (Iceland ~1,260, coastal Norway ~1,425); the dry continental Arctic inflates badly (Canada ~2,280, Alaska ~2,060, Russia ~1,930), most likely because snow and sea-ice albedo defeat the satellite's clearness retrieval. The accuracy check barely reaches this group: one of the 73 Arctic destinations has a published figure to compare against, and the two high-latitude cities that do have one are both about 450 hours over (Tromsø, Iqaluit). The published 212-hour error is therefore a mid-latitude number and does not describe the far north. The methodology page now states this outright and tells you to treat inland sunshine hours above roughly 60°N as unreliable. Temperature, rainfall and the warmth term are unaffected. No figures were changed; a correction is a separate piece of work and this is the honest interim.
  • Dataset edition 2026.11 adds one column, duplicate_of_iata (duplicateOfIata in the JSON). Nine metros are served by two airports and so hold two rows — Heathrow and Southend both filed under London, Glasgow and Prestwick, Seattle and Paine Field, and six more. That was documented in the dataset README but invisible in the files themselves, so anyone reading the CSV alone met two Londons with different sunshine totals and no way to tell why. The column now names the primary on each second row, so filtering it empty gives exactly one row per place: 3,824 of the 3,833. Both rows stay, because both are real — each carries the climate of its own coordinates, which is why the pair rarely agrees exactly. No existing value, column order or page URL changed.
  • The published accuracy figures were out of date and are now corrected. The methodology page and every dataset mirror said the modelled sunshine hours had been checked against 404 met-service cities with a bias of +22 hours. Re-running the validation against the current data gives 410 cities and a bias of +24 hours — the correlation (0.92) and mean absolute error (212 hours a year) are unchanged. The old numbers were correct when written and drifted as destination names were corrected in 2026.09 and 2026.10, which let more cities match the reference list.
• 27 July 2026

  Dataset edition 2026.10

  • Dataset edition 2026.10 published to every mirror (GitHub release, a new Zenodo DOI version, Hugging Face, Kaggle, figshare). It carries the midday UV index into the downloads as midday_uv_index and peak_midday_uv_index, and disambiguates 22 destinations that shared a name with somewhere else — Portland (Maine) from Portland, Oregon; Victoria (Seychelles) from Victoria, British Columbia — plus two renamed to the place their airport actually serves (RUN to Saint-Denis, SMS to Île Sainte-Marie). No IATA code changed, so page URLs and dataset joins are unaffected, and the climate values are identical to 2026.09.
• 23 July 2026

  Head-to-head comparisons

  • Head-to-head comparisons — two destinations side by side, month by month, with a verdict for each season and the months where it is genuinely too close to call.
• 22 July 2026

  A UV index, a Snow layer and two new rankings

  • A midday UV index for every destination, every month, on the WHO scale — in the facts grid and the monthly table on each destination page, and on the comparisons. It comes from the same NASA POWER climatology as the rest of the atlas, rescaled from POWER's 24-hour mean to the midday value forecasts report; the methodology page gives the rescaling and how it was checked.
  • A Snow layer on the globe — paint the world by monthly or year-round snowfall, alongside Sunny, Warm, Cold and Rain. Same guarded NASA POWER snowfall model as the snowfall figure on the destination cards, so the two always agree.
  • Two new ranking families: where is it rainy? — wettest and driest, every month — and where is it snowy?, running on the Snow layer's data. Both come with year-round editions: the wettest places in the world and the snowiest. In July the snow list belongs to the Andes and Patagonia; in January, to the Alaska panhandle.

  More details (2)

  • The browse pages — index, continents, countries — now show photo cards with each destination's picture and sunshine verdict, instead of bare text lists.
  • Every ranking page now navigates like the globe: a chip bar at the top switches between Sunny, Hot, Rainy and Snowy and between months in one tap, ranked photo cards lead each list, and destination pages gained jump links to their sections. A de-clutter pass to match: the footer's link walls folded into two tidy drawers, intro paragraphs slimmed down, the six per-continent tables became one-line accordions. Year-round editions now exist for all four rankings — reliably sunny, hottest, wettest, snowiest — and the homepage's new Browse page puts every ranking one tap away.
• 19 July 2026

  Dataset edition 2026.09: names and populations corrected

  • Dataset edition 2026.09: 118 destination names corrected where the record carried the airport's host municipality instead of the place it serves — Gaziemir became Izmir, Årø became Molde, Ciudad de la Costa became Montevideo — plus typo fixes and island conventions such as La Gomera and Elba. 146 populations corrected to describe the named place itself rather than an inherited catchment figure. Page URLs and climate values unchanged.
• 18 July 2026

  A lifetime sunshine calculator, share cards and a feed

  • A lifetime sunshine calculator — add the places you've lived and the years, get your total lived sunshine hours and a shareable card.
  • Every page without a photo of its own now gets a generated share card, so links pasted into chats and feeds preview properly. And an RSS feed, for following new studies and dataset editions.
  • Dataset edition 2026.08 published to every mirror: GitHub release, a new Zenodo DOI version, Hugging Face and Kaggle.

  More details (2)

  • A pass over the site copy for tone, and crisper favicons (96/192 px).
  • This page, and an about page — overdue.
• 15 July 2026

  NASA POWER end to end

  • The climate layer is now NASA POWER end to end (2001–2020). Earlier builds anchored temperatures to CRU CL v2.0, a 1961–1990 normal — mixing two reference periods was wrong, so CRU is gone entirely.
  • Fixed: the continent column. It used to come from per-airport metadata, was missing for a quarter of destinations, and silently defaulted to Asia — Fiji, Greenland and the Bahamas were all filed under "Asia". It's now derived from geography, with explicit rules for the six transcontinental countries.
  • Replaced rainy-days-per-year with annual rainfall in mm: POWER measures precipitation depth, not wet-day counts, and the old column wasn't worth guessing.
• 14 July 2026

  Best-time guides and badges

  • Best-time-to-visit guides for 64 countries and 5 island regions.
  • Every destination page gained an embeddable sunshine badge.
• 13 July 2026

  Verdicts, dots on the cities and a lighter homepage

  • Destination pages gained computed "How sunny is X?" verdicts — every claim traceable to the data.
  • Globe dots moved from the airport onto the city they serve.
  • Homepage payload halved (1.43 MB → 0.71 MB on the wire).
• 12 July 2026

  An MCP server and a DOI

  • The MCP server went live — any AI assistant can query the atlas, no key needed.
  • The dataset got a DOI and public mirrors.
  • Published launch-week crawler notes.
• 9 July 2026

  Sea temperatures, and Hacker News

  • Sea-surface temperatures for coastal destinations.
  • Launched on Hacker News.
• 8 July 2026

  Sunshine Atlas goes live

  • Sunshine Atlas goes live: 3,833 destinations, ~3,850 pages, one globe.