The world's busiest airports, from Phoenix's 3,833 sunshine hours to Chongqing's 734

Every dot is a city you can reach on a major scheduled route: one of the 171 destinations worldwide whose airport handled at least 10 million passengers in its latest reported year. Each is colored by its annual sunshine hours, from satellite-era climate normals.

Across the world's busiest airport cities, annual sunshine varies more than fivefold, from 734 hours to 3,833. The sunniest big hub is Phoenix, Arizona; the dimmest is Chongqing, China.

The result that surprised me most: the least-sunny major hubs on Earth are not in rainy northern Europe but in China's Sichuan Basin. The three dimmest big-hub cities in the world are all Chinese: Chongqing (734 h), Chengdu (891 h) and Changsha (1,103 h), sitting under near-permanent low cloud. All three get less annual sun than London (1,592 h) or Seattle (1,896 h).

At the bright end it is the U.S. Sun Belt and the Middle East: after Phoenix (3,833 h) come Medina (3,750 h), Las Vegas (3,742 h), Tijuana (3,734 h) and Riyadh (3,722 h). Even Dubai, the second-busiest airport in the set at 95 million passengers, records 3,278 hours.

Sunshine hours are modelled from NASA POWER satellite climatology (2001-2020, Angstrom-Prescott from all-sky insolation) and checked against 404 national met-service station records. The 10-million-passenger cutoff uses each airport's latest reported annual figure (2019-2025) from Wikidata. Basemap: Natural Earth.

Interactive version: spin the globe and repaint it by sunshine, warmth or rain for any month, at sunshineatlas.com