Where to go when you know how you want it to feel
Warm air, a sea you can actually swim in, snow, the northern lights or a night that never gets dark — pick what you are after and see where it exists right now. Thirty years of station records behind every answer. It is September.
What are you after?
Each list is ranked for the month you are actually in, and every card shows the numbers it was ranked on.
- Warm airTake me to summerWarm days somewhere, whatever the calendar says at home. The sea is shown on every card, warm or not.September · Canary Islands, Spain · +11
- Warm seaSomewhere I can swimThe stricter list. Warm air is not enough — the water has to be swimmable too.September · Canary Islands, Spain · +10
- SnowI want to see snowRanked by how snow-sure the place is, with the lift elevations on every card — because in half of these the town is green.Nothing here is in its snow season in September.
- AuroraI want to see the northern lightsRanked on geomagnetic latitude and winter cloud — not on how far north the map says it is.September · Yellowknife, Canada · +7
- Midnight sunI want a night that never gets darkPlaces with real midnight sun, using observed dates rather than a line on a map.The sun sets everywhere on this list in September — midnight sun runs from late April to late August.
What this is
Most "best places to go in January" lists are opinions. This one is a filter over 34 destinations with thirty years of station observations behind each of them, and it will tell you when the answer is "nowhere, go in March".
What it covers
34 destinations across 29 countries, including places split by coast where one answer for the whole country would be wrong — Sri Lanka's east and southwest have opposite dry seasons.
How this list is made
A ranking that will not show its criteria is an opinion. These are ours.
Warm days mean a mean daily maximum of 25–33 °C, scoring nothing below 20 °C or above 36 °C. The upper bound is not a formality: Dubai in July is 41 °C, and a list that treats hotter as better puts it first.
Swimmable means a sea of at least 22 °C. There is no meteorological standard for this — it is the convention northern-European travel publishers use, and we are telling you so rather than implying otherwise.
The criteria multiply rather than add, so a perfect air temperature cannot compensate for a cold sea. That is the whole reason the warm list and the swimming list are two separate lists.
Snow reliability is classified against the 100-day rule (Abegg 1996, after Föhn 1990): snow-reliable means at least 30 cm of cover on at least 100 days between 1 December and 15 April, in seven winters out of ten, with the line at about 1,200 m in the Swiss Alps. We classify against that rule and cite it; we do not compute it, because no free dataset carries per-resort snow depth.
Aurora is ranked on corrected geomagnetic latitude, not geographic latitude, and on median winter cloud. The oval sits at roughly 65–70° geomagnetic and moves about 2° equatorward per unit of Kp.
Tropical-cyclone seasons are applied separately from rainfall. A peak month is excluded outright; a shoulder month is capped no matter how dry it is.
Temperature and rainfall are 1991–2020 monthly normals computed from NOAA's Global Historical Climatology Network station records — the station used for each destination is named on its card, along with how far away it is. Sea-surface temperature comes from NOAA OISST v2.1 over the same period. Rain days count days with at least 2.5 mm.
These are thirty-year averages, not a forecast. They tell you what a month is usually like, never what next Tuesday will be.
Sources
About these lists
Almost always the sea. The Canaries in January are 21 °C in the air and 19 °C in the water — a genuine answer to "somewhere warm" and a bad answer to "somewhere I can swim". Rather than pick one meaning and be wrong for half of you, we run two lists.
Because for about half of these places the town temperature is the wrong number. Chamonix's valley sits at 1,035 m and is often green in January while its lifts reach 3,842 m. The elevation pair tells you what you actually need to know; a valley temperature would just mislead you confidently.
December has the most hours of darkness and the worst odds per hour. Geomagnetic activity peaks around the equinoxes — the Russell–McPherron effect — so March and September–October are roughly twice as likely to deliver. If you can only travel in December you will still see them; you will just need more nights.
No. Every number here is a 1991–2020 average from a named weather station. They describe what a month is usually like. For the next two weeks, use a forecast.
Usually because there is no weather station near it with a long enough record, and we would rather leave a place out than publish a number measured 400 km away. Palawan is out for exactly that reason.
Otherwise January's warm list is eight Spanish islands. The cap is applied after ranking, so it never changes which place is better — only how many of one country's you see at once.
Take the destination and the month straight into the packing calculator — it will use the real forecast when you get close enough for one.