Where the Midnight Sun Also Comes

The sunniest place on Earth may be on an Arctic island, in the land of the midnight sun.

Ellesmere Island in the Arctic. Photo: All Canada Photos/Alamy Stock Photo.

One way to determine where the sun shines the most is by how long the sun stays out. According to the BBC, statistics show that both the Eureka and Alert research stations on Ellesmere Island, Canada, have high levels of sunshine.

May is the sunniest month, with sunshine lasting 65.4% of the day in Eureka, or more than 15 hours. But the average daily temperature here is -10 degrees Celsius, which is not favorable for sunbathing.

The two stations are located in the Arctic Circle, at a latitude known as the “land of the midnight sun” because in the summer the sun never sets below the horizon and shines for days on end. The Arctic is a snowy region but in theory it could be considered a desert with very little cloud or rain.

With 24 hours of sunshine a day and relatively little cloud cover, the Ellesmere Island research station enjoys the most hours of sunshine in the world, at least in May. But in December, the situation is reversed. The opposite of midnight sun is polar night, when the sun does not rise for six months.

According to weather stations across the United States, Yuma, Arizona, is the sunniest place in the world. The average sunshine hours here range from 11 hours in the winter to 13 hours in the summer, with a 90% chance of sunshine.

“The southwestern United States is under the influence of high pressure for much of the year, which brings warm air over the region,” explains Michael Crimmins, a climatologist at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “This leads to many cloudless days and warm temperatures.”

Yuma is known for its sunshine due to its subtropical location, Crimmins said. Thanks to an atmospheric circulation called the Hadley Cell, the area is both hot and dry.

Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Photo: Dennis Frates/Alamy Stock Photo.

In 2007, NASA scientists used satellites to find the sunniest spots on Earth. Sensors on the satellites can measure radiation reflected off clouds or from the Earth’s surface, including bodies of water. The sunniest spots the team found were all far from populated areas.

The sunniest area offshore is in the Pacific Ocean, south of the US state of Hawaii and east of the island nation of Kiribati. On land, an area of ​​the Sahara Desert near Agadem, Niger, has the least cloud cover.

The Sahara Desert. Photo: Frans Lemmens/Alamy Stock Photo.

The researchers calculated the average daily solar energy these areas received from 1983 to 2005. The recorded solar energy in the desert was 6.78 kWh/m2 and in the ocean was 6.92 kWh/m2, equivalent to the average amount of electricity used to heat water in a US home each day.

"The statistics are taken from satellite cloud measurements and other information about the atmosphere, and then estimated the solar energy reaching the surface," said Paul Stackhouse at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

According to VnExpress