OSLO — Southern California is sunny, the French Riviera is sunny, but NASA says the middle of the Pacific Ocean and the Sahara Desert in Niger are the sunniest places -- and the information could be worth money.
America's space exploration agency has located the world's sunniest spots by studying maps compiled by U.S. and European satellites.
The maps can also gauge solar energy at every other spot on the planet and already have been used to help businesses site solar panels in Morocco, for instance, or send text messages to tell sunbathers in Italy to put on more cream.
"We are trying to link up observations of the Earth to benefit society," said Jose Achache, head of the 72-nation Group on Earth Observations, which seeks practical spinoffs from scientific data ranging from deep-ocean probes to satellites.
GEO member states held ministerial talks Nov. 30 in Cape Town, South Africa, to review a 10-year project launched in 2005 that aims to join the dots among research in areas such as climate change, health, agriculture and energy.
From satellite data collected over 22 years, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the sun blazes most fiercely on a patch of the Pacific on the Equator south of Hawaii and east of the island nation of Kiribati.
More practically for solar generation, the Sahara region soaks up the most energy on land, with the sunniest spot in southeast Niger, where a ruined fort at Agadem bakes amid sand dunes.
For some reason, there are fewer clouds there than elsewhere in the Sahara, said Paul Stackhouse, a senior scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center.
The area got a searing average of 6.78 kilowatt-hours of solar energy per square meter a day from 1983 to 2005 -- roughly the amount of electricity used by a typical U.S. home to heat water each day. The patch in the Pacific got 6.92 kilowatt hours.
The maps could help guide billions of dollars in solar investments for a world worried by climate change -- widely blamed on burning fossil fuels -- that could mean more floods, droughts, heat waves and rising seas.
Satellite pictures also could help site offshore wind farms. Wind speeds can be inferred from wave heights and direction. Farmers might be able to pick new crops or estimate fertilizer demand by knowing more about how much solar energy is reaching their land.
