Outdoor Hours Map — How Many Hours a Year It's Comfortable to Sit Outside

How the Outdoor Hours Index is computed

Most "best climate for outdoor living" content online is a ranked listicle built on annual mean temperature alone — it says nothing about rain, wind, or how hot the hottest hours actually feel. OHI is built half-hour by half-hour instead. CHELSA 1981–2010 provides daily maximum and minimum temperature as a climatology at ~1 km resolution; OHI reconstructs a diurnal cycle from those two values using a sinusoidal day curve peaking at 14:30 solar time, then evaluates apparent temperature at every half-hour of daylight — sunrise to sunset, computed from latitude and time of year.

Each half-hourly reading becomes an apparent temperature: on the warm side, the Steadman apparent-temperature formula, which adds humidity (from ERA5 dewpoint) and subtracts wind; on the cold side, the NWS wind chill formula. The comfort band is 10–29°C apparent, treated probabilistically rather than as a hard cutoff — day-to-day variability of σ = 3.5°C means a reading right at the edge of the band counts as partially comfortable instead of flipping from fully counted to not counted at all. Hours lost to rain come from converting monthly rainfall totals to wet-hours at 1.5 mm/h, capped at 60% of any month's hours; hours lost to wind use the Rayleigh probability of hourly wind exceeding 30 km/h, derived from ERA5 monthly mean wind.

Even a Mediterranean island loses hundreds of hours to cold

This is the Outdoor Hours layer over northern Sardinia, near Olbia and Arzachena, in relative mode — the green ramp is stretched to the current viewport rather than the fixed global scale, which is what makes local contrast pop. The pin reads 3,083 h/yr, rated "Excellent."

GeoRank app, Outdoor Hours layer, relative color mode — northern Sardinia (Olbia/Arzachena area). Pin breakdown: lost to heat 158 h · cold 717 h · rain 137 h · wind 366 h.

Read the breakdown chip on that pin and cold is the single largest loss category — 717 hours, more than four times the 158 hours lost to heat. That's the value of decomposing the number instead of publishing one score: a warm-climate island still has winter mornings and evenings below the 10°C apparent-temperature floor, and the daylight hours in December and January outnumber the handful of July afternoons hot enough to fail the upper bound.

How to read an Outdoor Hours pin

Every pin shows an annual hours figure plus a four-way breakdown: hours lost to heat, cold, rain, and wind. Add the comfortable count back to the four loss categories and you get roughly the total daylight hours the model evaluates across the year — in the Sardinia example, 3,083 + 158 + 717 + 137 + 366 = 4,461, which lines up with the map's 0–4,500 h/yr legend range. The rating labels are fixed thresholds on that scale — Exceptional from 3,400 h/yr, Excellent from 2,800, Good from 2,200, Moderate from 1,600, Limited from 1,000, Very limited below that — so the Sardinia pin's 3,083 lands squarely in the Excellent band.

Outdoor Hours worldwide: seven example cities

Computed from the 1981–2010 CHELSA + ERA5 climatology. Dubai fails the comfort band on heat; Singapore fails on heat combined with humidity; Reykjavik fails on cold — three different climates, three different failure modes, one comparable number.

How to use the Outdoor Hours map

The interactive GeoRank map renders Outdoor Hours as a green gradient — the darker the swatch, the more hours per year are comfortable outside. Pan, zoom, and click any pin for the annual figure, the monthly profile, and the heat/cold/rain/wind breakdown. The same view stacks temperature, sunshine, rainfall, cost, and safety, which is closer to the real relocation question: not just "where's comfortable outside" but "where's comfortable outside and affordable and visa-accessible."

What the Outdoor Hours Index isn't

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Frequently asked questions