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hours per year
What stands out. High tropical cities come out on top: La Paz, Cusco, Quito, Bogotá, Addis Ababa, Mexico City and Kunming stay mild year-round because altitude cancels the tropical heat. Coastal California, central Chile, Australia's southern coast and New Zealand come next. The humid lowland tropics come last, since almost every working hour there is too hot or too muggy.
How it's estimated. For most cities there's no hourly record here, so each city's monthly averages (daily high, daily low, dew point or humidity, rainy days) from its Wikipedia climate table are turned into typical hours with a simple model. It spreads each month across a normal daily temperature curve, then adds the day-to-day swings measured in US hourly data. When I tested the model on 55 US stations with real hourly data, it landed within about 10% of the true count for most cities. The US dots use those stations' own typical-year data.
Rain. Rain hours come from each city's average number of rainy days. In the US data, about 22% of work-window hours on a rainy day are wet. This is rough: a monsoon downpour and an all-day drizzle count the same.
Read the dots, not the shading. Colors between cities are blended from the nearest cities and fade out where the nearest one is far away. Mountains break this badly: the shading can't tell La Paz from the Amazon lowland 300 km away. A few cities had humidity or rainy days filled in from a similar nearby city; the city panel says so.