Sunniest Places on Earth by Annual Sunshine
Key Findings
About This Dataset
Sunniest Places on Earth by Annual SunshineYuma, Arizona, leads the world with about 4,015 hours of sunshine a year, meaning the sun shines during more than 90% of all possible daylight hours. To put that in perspective, a full year contains roughly 4,380 daylight hours, so Yuma is cloudy for only a tiny fraction of the time. The rest of the list is dominated by desert locations where dry, stable air keeps clouds away: Egypt's Marsa Alam (3,958 hours) and Aswan (3,863), Chile's Calama (3,926) in the Atacama, Arizona's Phoenix (3,871) and Namibia's Keetmanshoop (3,870). All six exceed 3,850 hours, clustering within about 4% of one another. The common ingredient is subtropical high pressure over arid land, the same climatic setting that also produces the world's driest places.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- WMO / sunshine duration records
- Coverage
- 6 entities · 6 observations
- Measure
- Average Annual Sunshine (hours)
- Last updated
- 7 July 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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