The sunniest counties in America

How to read this map

The map sets one range on the county data: January Sunshine from 1.50 to 3.00. A county is drawn solid navy when it falls inside every range, dotted when it misses one, and hatched when it reports no figure for one of the measures, so a hatched county is neither a match nor a miss. Recounted today from the county database, 242 of the 3,097 counties with a figure for every range fall inside all of them, and Texas has the most with 81. The count in the title is the count on the day the map ran; the two can differ when a source is refreshed.

The figures are the same ones behind every county page on this site: Census population and household income, Zillow home values, HUD fair market rents, County Health Rankings measures of crime and health, NOAA temperatures and USDA amenity scores, each stored with its publication year and listed below for this map. "Play with this map" opens the live county map with these ranges already set, so you can move a handle and watch the count change; "Make your own" starts from a blank map.

Sources

• USDA Natural Amenities Scale (Z-score)

Solid navy marks counties inside every range on this map, dotted counties miss one or all of them, and hatched counties have no figure for that measure. On a heatmap, darker means higher and faded counties fall outside the range.