Flightmussy/sunshine-atlas

Sunshine Atlas — open climate dataset

Monthly 0–100 Sunshine Scores, day/night temperatures, rainfall and sea temperature for 3,833 destinations worldwide — every one of them served by its own airport (one primary airport per metro area; London appears once, not five times). Built from long-term climate normals, not forecasts.

Published by Sunshine Atlas; this is a mirror of the canonical dataset at sunshineatlas.com/data, which regenerates with every site build.

Files

File	Contents
sunshine-atlas-destinations.csv	One row per destination: IATA code, city, country, continent, coordinates, elevation, population, annual sunshine hours, rainy days, climate band, destination type, best month, and the Sunshine Score for the year + all 12 months.
sunshine-atlas-monthly-climate.csv	One row per destination-month (45,996 rows): Sunshine Score, average day high °C, night low °C, rainfall mm, and sea-surface temperature °C for coastal places.
sunshine-atlas-destinations.json	Everything above as one JSON array, monthly values as arrays, plus each destination's page URL.

Join key across files: iata (the destination's primary airport).

Quick start

import pandas as pd

monthly = pd.read_csv(
    "hf://datasets/Flightmussy/sunshine-atlas/sunshine-atlas-monthly-climate.csv"
)

# The sunniest places in November
nov = monthly[monthly.month == "Nov"].nlargest(10, "sunshine_score")
print(nov[["city", "sunshine_score", "day_high_c", "sea_temp_c"]])

Every destination has a deep-linkable page (https://sunshineatlas.com/destinations/<city>-<iata>/, the url field in the JSON) — and the dataset is queryable live by AI assistants over MCP: endpoint https://sunshineatlas.com/api/mcp, read-only, no key.

The Sunshine Score

One number, 0–100, for how good a destination's sunshine is in a given month: daytime warmth (full marks 20–32 °C) × dryness (monthly precipitation) × sunniness (annual sunshine hours). A freezing-but-clear month scores zero on purpose — it measures pleasant sunshine. Full formula: sunshineatlas.com/methodology.

License & citation

CC BY 4.0 — free for research, journalism and apps. Credit Sunshine Atlas and link to https://sunshineatlas.com/data/.

Sunshine Atlas (2026). Monthly sunshine scores and climate normals for 3,833 destinations (2026.07 edition). sunshineatlas.com/data/

Upstream sources: climate normals from CRU climatology; places & populations © GeoNames & OurAirports (CC BY); sea temperatures via Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0).

Versioning

This mirror is the 2026.07 edition. Climate normals change rarely; mirrored editions refresh only when the underlying data does. The canonical files at sunshineatlas.com/data are always current. GitHub mirror & issues: Flightmussy/sunshine-atlas-data.