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Starting from the best and ending with the worst, I would rank like this: Lima, Chongqing, Malabo.
Chongqing is better than Malabo because the hot season lasts only part of the year there but Malabo is tropically hot all year round and in combination with poor hours of sunshine, it has a worse effect.
The closest to Lima I could find is along the central Baja coast of Mexico on the Pacific side. The problem is the Baja coast is lightly populated and there are only a few reporting stations in the 700 miles or so of coastline. Similar temperatures, very little rainfall and few sunny days.
Cedros Island is the most similar I could find. Like much of the pacific coast days probably begin cloudy with the sun breaking out mid morning. This is due to the cool water temperatures for an area this far south. The larger diurnal temperature variation is probably due to the actual reporting station being farther away from the ocean than indicated. A few miles inland make a big difference.
There are probably spots with much closer climates to Lima but the data there is too spotty.
It looks very similar but I suspect it got much more sunshine, even though that data says that most days got some cloudiness. I can't find any sunshine hours info for Cedros Island/Isla Cedros, but going by worldwide sun irradiation map Baja looks like having intense sun and Lima area having that very thin strip of low sun (and much sun right behind it up in the Andes). The map though not of a very good resolution. https://africacheck.org/wp-content/u...015/10/dni.jpg
San Diego is off the same cold current and very sunny, still, even in the very the coast strip (I lived there too). In the coastal strip in SD it's cloudy on many mornings but it's gone by 11am-noon and then gets blasted by the strongest sun.
I don’t think it can get close to the Peruvian coast’s figures, but I suspect the Northern part of the Namib Desert is much cloudier than the Walvis Bay area, especially where the coast faces the southwest. Namibe, Angola, reports 2175 hours per year. Of course, one must be always careful with the sunshine data. For instance, the sunshine hours for Malabo look absolutely unreliable.
I don’t think it can get close to the Peruvian coast’s figures, but I suspect the Northern part of the Namib Desert is much cloudier than the Walvis Bay area, especially where the coast faces the southwest. Namibe, Angola, reports 2175 hours per year. Of course, one must be always careful with the sunshine data. For instance, the sunshine hours for Malabo look absolutely unreliable.
Why? I looked at different sources for Malabo - all state about the same hours of sunshine, some higher by only about 50-100 hours.
There isn’t really any reason for this figure to be THAT low…
All the sources must come from a primary source which is likely to be faulty. As I’ve said before, we should observe with further criticism all the sunshine data around, especially from secondary sources. Even among official records there is a lot of sunshine data which goes from suspicious to total nonsense. You've got to be careful when you use this kind of data. This parameter, maybe more than any other, has proved to be problematic.
The allegedly low sunshine of Malabo may be related to the fact that it's located in an Equatorial island in the coast of the foot of a 3000 m mountain. Then, wet air from the sea rises quickly over the island and generates a lot of cloud cover everywhere. However, figures are just too extreme. A good example of what Malabo might be in terms of sunshine is nearby Douala, in Cameroon.
In case of Malabo, I see that there isn’t even an ongoing international SYNOP report for the station, let alone CLIMATs. Equatorial Guinea hasn’t provided 1961-1990 normals sets either.
There isn’t really any reason for this figure to be THAT low…
All the sources must come from a primary source which is likely to be faulty. As I’ve said before, we should observe with further criticism all the sunshine data around, especially from secondary sources. Even among official records there is a lot of sunshine data which goes from suspicious to total nonsense. You've got to be careful when you use this kind of data. This parameter, maybe more than any other, has proved to be problematic.
The allegedly low sunshine of Malabo may be related to the fact that it's located in an Equatorial island in the coast of the foot of a 3000 m mountain. Then, wet air from the sea rises quickly over the island and generates a lot of cloud cover everywhere. However, figures are just too extreme. A good example of what Malabo might be in terms of sunshine is nearby Douala, in Cameroon.
In case of Malabo, I see that there isn’t even an ongoing international SYNOP report for the station, let alone CLIMATs. Equatorial Guinea hasn’t provided 1961-1990 normals sets either.
I'd go with multiple sources including Wikipedia (especially since it's not challenged, and wiki is easy to challenge) and may be with taking an average - some of these sources might be based on computer modeling.
Douala is laying in coastal plain, without mountains behind and having dry hot land behind it, so yes this might be a factor, plus not even sure Douala Wiki info is accurate.
If you look at this monthly sunshine hours chart for Douala and sum them up, it's coming up to about what Malabo annual sunshine hours areand much lower what's in wiki for Douala: https://weather-and-climate.com/aver...ouala,Cameroon
Climates often were getting wetter during last few decades, by the way.
Wiki says: "Malabo is one of the cloudiest, wettest and most lightning-prone capitals of the world, and experiences much fog and haze even when it's not raining in the driest months."
By the way, another way to look at it - there's international Ariport in Malabo, and visibility which is connected to fog, clouds, etc is very important, they must be surveying these factors. Weatherspark cites International airport in Malabo: https://weatherspark.com/y/148097/Av...nea-Year-Round
This chart set doesn't have "hours of sunshine", only daylight hours which counts sunny and overcast as daylight.
If you look at chart with percent fully overcast, partially overcast, etc and also "Cloud Cover Categories" standalone chart and run percentages against sunniest place on Earth or at similar latitudes, one can arrive to alternative number for Malabo which I think is close to official info in wiki.
PS: I run some very rough estimate based on comparison with Mogadishu, Somalia "Cloud cover categories" chart (very sunny and almost the same latitude place), and got roughly the same sunshine hours for Malabo as wiki gives for it
Any idea why equatorial South East Asia especially Borneo gets more sunshine than equatorial Africa and especially South America? I've heard of this before, e.g. in the context of why certain crops yield more in southeast Asia than in other tropical rainforest climates.
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