How much sunlight Maine gets, compared with all the other states

Summer in Maine is magical.

The problem is, there are nine other months.

According to the Washington Post, July 8 is historically the sunniest day of the year. Which means each subsequent day is part of the grim march toward our annual five-month meditation on death and loneliness.

That’s based on more than 30 years of sunlight data from NASA, which was compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Post mapped the average daily sunlight of each county in the U.S. from 1979 to 2011, which you can play with in the interactive above.

Sunlight in this case is measured by kilojoules of solar radiation per square meter. And Maine is part of that sad little swath of dark blue across the northern U.S., which denotes the lowest average amount of daily sunlight.

The sunniest counties in Maine are along the coast from York to Lincoln.

The paper also mapped the average sunlight by month, showing that Maine’s sunniest months are June and July, which makes sense. Check out those maps here.

Dan MacLeod

About Dan MacLeod

Dan MacLeod is the managing editor of the Bangor Daily News. He's an Orland native who moved to Portland in 2002 and now lives in Unity. He's been a journalist since 2008, and previously worked for the New York Post and the Brooklyn Paper.