The End of Upwelling


What a difference a week makes.







2 replies
  1. Charles P. Lichtenwalner
    Charles P. Lichtenwalner says:

    I like the colormap, but I am not sure white is neutral. Have you tried it with blue->green->red?
    Can you give me an algorithm to convert a colormap range to LED RGB intensities?

    • Sage Lichtenwalner
      Sage Lichtenwalner says:

      White is often used as the neutral color in divergent colormaps, when you’re tryign to show the distance to two extremes from a common mid point. (See, for example this EOS article and the often cited Colorbrewer tool.) The main issue with adding green to the mix is that it makes the map far more challenging for colorblind users, though I guess it really depends on the exact hues you choose.

      Scientists, at least the non-colorblind ones, are used to seeing rainbow colormaps, and so are accustomed to 0 being in the middle/green, that is, if the colormap limits are centered properly, which is another common problem. Personally, when looking at data that spans both sides of 0, I prefer 0 to be colored as white, so I don’t have to guess which color of the rainbow it might be this time. That also saves you from having to mentally tax your mind to figure out which areas of the image are positive or negative, which is typically what you want to do with this kind of dataset.

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