So this puzzle isn’t about sunshine (the amount of time the sun shines from a clear sky), or even about the intensity of sunlight (which decreases with increasing latitude), but about cumulative daylight—the length of time between sunrise and sunset in a given place, added up over the course of a year.*
It’s a surprisingly complicated little problem. I addressed it using an antique solar calculator I wrote many years ago, using Peter Duffett-Smith’s excellent books as my primary references:
It runs in Visual Basic 6, which means I had to open up my VirtualBox virtual XP machine to get it running again. The original program calculates the position of the sun by date and time for any given set of coordinates, and also works out the times of sunrise and sunset.
You’ll see it gives sunrise and sunset times to one-second precision, which is entirely spurious—the refractive state of the atmosphere is so variable that there’s no real point in quoting these times to anything beyond the nearest minute. I just couldn’t bring myself to hide the extra column of figures.
Anyway, it was a fairly quick job to write a little routine that cycled this calculator through a full year of daylight, adding up the total and spitting out the results so that I could begin exploring the problem.
At first glance, it seems like there shouldn’t be any particular place that wins out. As the Earth moves around the sun, its north pole is alternately tilted towards the sun and away from it, at an angle of about 23.5º. If we look at a diagram of these two solstice points (which occur in June and December every year), there’s an obvious symmetry between the illuminated and unilluminated parts of the globe:
Between the solstices, the latitude at which the sun is overhead varies continuously from 23.5ºN (in June) to 23.5ºS (in December), and then back again:
Solar latitude by day of the year
So for every long summer day, there should be an equal and opposite long winter night. The short and long days should average out, during the course of a year, to half a day’s daylight per day—equivalent to 4280 hours in a 365-day calendar year.
And that would be true if the Earth’s orbit around the sun was precisely circular—but it isn’t. As I described in my first post about the word perihelion, the Earth is at its closest to the sun in January, and its farthest in July. Since it moves along its orbit more quickly when it’s closer to the sun, it passes through the December solstice faster than through the June solstice. This has the effect of shortening the southern summer and the northern winter. The effect isn’t immediately obvious in my diagram of solar latitudes, above, but it’s there—the sun spends just 179 days in the southern sky, but 186 days north of the equator.
This means that the total number of hours of daylight is biased towards the northern hemisphere. In the diagram below, I plot the hypothetical flat distribution of daylight hours associated with a circular orbit in purple, and compare it to the effect of Earth’s real elliptical orbit in green:
So far, I’ve been treating the sun as if it were a point source of light, rising and setting in an instant of time. But the real sun has a visible disc, about half a degree across in the sky. This means that when the centre of the sun drops below the horizon, it’s only halfway through setting. Sunrise starts when the upper edge of the sun first appears; sunset finishes when the the upper edge of the sun disappears. So the extent of the solar disc slightly prolongs daylight hours, and slightly shortens the night.
At the equator the sun rises and sets vertically, and the upper half of the solar disc takes about a minute to appear or disappear. An extra minute of daylight in the morning, an extra minute of daylight in the evening—that’s more than twelve hours extra daylight during the course of a year, just because the sun is a disc and not a point.
And if we move north or south of the equator, the sun rises and sets at an angle relative to the horizon, and so takes longer to appear and disappear—adding more hours to the total daylight experienced at higher latitudes. There’s a limit to this effect, however. When we get to the polar circles, we run into the paired phenomena of the midnight sun and the polar night. There are days in summer when the sun never sets, and days in winter when the sun never rises. The extent of the solar disc can make no difference to the length of daylight if the sun is permanently above the horizon, and it can add only a few hours to the total as the sun skims below the horizon at the start and end of polar night. And as we move towards the poles, the midnight sun and polar night start to dominate the calendar, with only short periods around the equinoxes that have a normal day/night cycle. So although the sunrises and sunsets within the polar circles are notably prolonged, there are fewer of them.
Midnight sun and polar night begin to dominate over the normal day/night cycle as you go farther north (the situation is symmetrical in the southern polar circle, except with the times of polar night and midnight sun reversed)
So the prolongation of daylight caused by the rising and setting of the solar disc increases steadily with latitude until it peaks at the polar circles (around 66.5ºN and 66.5ºS), after which it declines again. Here’s a diagram of daylight hours predicted for a point-like sun (my previous green curve) with the effect of the solar disc added in red:
And there’s another effect to factor in at this point—atmospheric refraction. As I described in my post discussing the shape of the low sun, light from the rising and setting sun follows a slightly curved path through the atmosphere, lifting the image of the sun by a little over half a degree above its real position. This means that when we see the sun on the horizon, its real position is actually below the horizon. This effect hastens the sunrise and delays the sunset, and it does so in a way that is identical to simply making the solar disc wider—instead of just an extra couple of minutes’ daylight at the equator, more than six minutes are added when refraction is factored in, with proportional increases at other latitudes. So here’s a graph showing the original green curve of a point-like sun, the red curve showing the effect of the solar disc, and a blue curve added to show the effect of refraction, too:
The longest cumulative daylight is at the Arctic Circle, with latitude 66.7ºN experiencing 4649 hours of daylight in the year 2017. The shortest period is at the south pole, with just 4388 hours. That’s almost eleven days of a difference!
So is the answer to my original question just “the Arctic Circle”? Well, no. I have one more influence on the duration of daylight to deploy, and this time it’s a local one—altitude. The higher you go, the lower the horizon gets, making the sun rise earlier and set later. This only works if you have a clear view of a sea-level (or approximately sea-level) horizon—from an aircraft or the top of a mountain. Being on a high plateau doesn’t work, because your horizon is determined by the local terrain, rather than the distant curvature of the Earth. So although the south pole has an altitude of 2700m, it’s sitting in the middle of the vast polar plateau, and I think there will be a minimal effect from altitude on the duration of its daylight.
So we need to look for high mountains close to the Arctic Circle. A glance at the map suggests four mountainous regions that need to be investigated—the Cherskiy Range, in eastern Siberia; the Scandinavian Mountains; Greenland; and the region in Alaska where the Arctic Circle threads between the Brooks Range to the north and the Alaska Range to the south.
Source of base map
The highest point in the Cherskiy Range is Gora Pobeda (“Victory Peak”). At 65º11′N and 3003m, its summit gets 5002 hours of daylight—almost an hour a day of extra sunlight, on average.
But Pobeda is nudged out of pole position in the Cherskiy Range by an unnamed 2547m summit on the Chemalginskiy ridge, which lies almost exactly on the Arctic Circle, giving it a calculated 5006 hours of daylight.
There’s nothing over 2000m near the Arctic Circle in the Scandinavian Mountains, so we can skip past them to 3383m Mount Forel, in Greenland, at 66º56′N, which beats the Siberian mountains with 5052 hours of daylight.
Finally, the Arctic Circle passes north of Canada’s Mackenzie Mountains, and between the Brooks and Alaska Ranges. Mount Isto, the highest point in the Brooks Range, is 2736m high at 69º12′N, and comes in just behind Pobeda, with 4993 hours of daylight. Mount Igikpak, lower but nearer the Circle (2523m, 67º25′N), pushes past all the Siberian summits to hit 5010 hours. And in the Alaska Range is Denali, the highest mountain in North America. It is 6190m high, and sits at 63º04′N. It could have been a serious contender if it had been just a little farther north—but as it is it merely equals Igikpak, and falls short of Forel’s total.
So the answer to my question appears to be that the summit of Mount Forel, Greenland, sees the most daylight of any place on the planet.† I confess I didn’t see that one coming when I started thinking about this.
* “A year” is a slightly slippery concept in this setting. The sun doesn’t return to exactly the same position in the sky at the end of each calendar year, and leap years obviously contain an extra day’s daylight compared to ordinary years. Ideally I should have added up my hours of daylight over a few millennia—but I’m really just interested in the proportions, and they’re not strongly influenced by the choice of calendar year. So for simplicity I ran my program to generate data for 2017 only.
† What I wrote at the start of this piece, about spurious precision in rising and setting times, goes doubly for the calculations concerning altitude. These results are exquisitely sensitive to the effects of variable refraction, and my post about the shape of the low sun gives a lot more detail about how the polar regions are home to some surprising mirages that prolong sunrises and sunsets. I can’t hope to account for local miraging, or even to correctly reproduce the temperature gradient in the atmosphere from day to day. I think the best that can really be said is that some of the contenders I list will experience more daylight than anywhere else on the planet, most years, and that Mount Forel will be in with a good shot of taking the record for any given year.
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