Oceanography The Official Magazine of
The Oceanography Society
Volume 29 Issue 03

View Issue TOC
Volume 29, No. 3
Pages 9 - 13

OpenAccess

COMMENTARY • True Colors of Oceanography: Guidelines for Effective and Accurate Colormap Selection

By Kristen M. Thyng , Chad A. Greene , Robert D. Hetland , Heather M. Zimmerle , and Steven F. DiMarco 
Jump to
Citation References Copyright & Usage
First Paragraph

Data graphics shape the way science is communicated, and the color schemes we employ can either faithfully represent or tacitly obscure the data a figure is intended to convey (Tufte, 1983). Tasteful use of color can make data graphics visually appealing and can draw viewers in, engaging the audience and encouraging further inspection of a figure. But wherever color is used to represent numerical values, its role transitions from a mere aesthetic nicety to carrying the responsibility of conveying data honestly and accurately. Yet, biases introduced by some common colormaps have gone widely unrecognized within the oceanographic community. Here, we describe the pitfalls of some commonly used colormaps, provide guidelines on effective, accurate colormap selection, and present a suite of perceptually uniform cmocean colormaps that have been designed for oceanographic data display. The cmocean package is available across multiple software programs, including MATLAB, Python, R, Generic Mapping Tools, and Ocean Data Viewer.

Citation

Thyng, K.M., C.A. Greene, R.D. Hetland, H.M. Zimmerle, and S.F. DiMarco. 2016. True colors of oceanography: Guidelines for effective and accurate colormap selection. Oceanography 29(3):9–13, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2016.66.

References

Borkin, M., K. Gajos, A. Peters, D. Mitsouras, S. Melchionna, F. Rybicki, C. Feldman, and H. Pfister. 2011. Evaluation of artery visualizations for heart disease diagnosis. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 17(12):2,479–2,488, https://doi.org/​10.1109/TVCG.2011.192.

Borland, D., and R.M. Taylor II. 2007. Rainbow color map (still) considered harmful. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (2):14–17, https://doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2007.323435.

Brewer, C. 2013. “Colorbrewer 2.0: Color advice for cartography,” http://colorbrewer2.org

Bryant, B., M. Holiner, R. Kroot, K. Sherman-Morris, W.B. Smylie, L. Stryjewski, M. Thomas, and C.I. Williams. 2014. Usage of color scales on radar maps. Journal of Operational Meteorology 2:169–179, https://doi.org/10.15191/nwajom.2014.0214.

Eddins, S. 2014. “A new colormap for MATLAB: Part 1. Introduction.” http://blogs.mathworks.com/steve/2014/10/13/a-new-colormap-for-matlab-​part-1-introduction

Greene, C.A., D.E. Gwyther, and D.D. Blankenship. In press. Antarctic mapping tools for MATLAB. Computers and Geosciences, https://doi.org/​10.1016/j.cageo.2016.08.003.

Hunter, J.D. 2007. Matplotlib: A 2D graphics environment. Computing In Science & Engineering 9(3):90–95, https://doi.org/10.1109/MCSE.2007.55.

Li, C., M. Ronnier Luo, C. Li, and G. Cui. 2012. The CRI-CAM02UCS colour rendering index. Color Research & Application 37(3):160–167, https://doi.org/10.1002/col.20682.

Light, A., and P.J. Bartlein. 2004. The end of the rainbow? Color schemes for improved data graphics. Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union 85(40):385–391, https://doi.org/​10.1029/2004EO400002.

Mersey, J.E. 1990. Colour and Thematic Map Design: The Role of Colour Scheme and Map Complexity in Choropleth Map Communication. University of Toronto Press, 157 pp.

Meyer, G.W., and D.P. Greenberg. 1980. Perceptual color spaces for computer graphics. ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics 14(3):254–261, https://doi.org/10.1145/800250.807502.

Moreland, K. 2009. Diverging color maps for scientific visualization. Pp. 92–103 in Advances in Visual Computing. Springer.

Newhall, S.M. 1940. Preliminary report of the OSA subcommittee on the spacing of the Munsell colors. Journal of the Optical Society of America 30(12):617–645, https://doi.org/10.1364/JOSA.30.000617.

Niccoli, M. 2012. “The rainbow is dead…long live the rainbow! Series Outline,” https://mycarta.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/the-rainbow-is-dead-long-live-the-rainbow-series-outline.

Rappaport, C. 2002. A color map for effective black-and-white rendering of color-scale images. IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine 44(3):94–96, https://doi.org/10.1109/MAP.2002.1028735.

Rheingans, P.L. 2000. Task-based color scale design. Pp. 35–43 in 28th AIPR Workshop: 3D Visualization for Data Exploration and Decision Making. International Society for Optics and Photonics.

Robertson, P.K. 1990. A methodology for scientific data visualisation: Choosing representations based on a natural scene paradigm. Pp. 114–123 in Visualization’90, Proceedings of the First IEEE Conference on Visualization, San Francisco, CA, October 23–26, 1990, https://doi.org/10.1109/VISUAL.1990.146372.

Samsel, F., M. Petersen, T. Geld, G. Abram, J. Wendelberger, and J. Ahrens. 2015. Colormaps that improve perception of high-resolution ocean data. Pp. 703–710 in Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, https://doi.org/10.1145/2702613.2702975.

Sharpe, L.T., A. Stockman, H. Jägle, and J. Nathans. 1999. Opsin genes, cone photopigments, color vision, and color blindness. Pp. 3–51 in Color vision: From Genes to Perception. K.R. Gegenfurtner, and L.T. Sharpe, eds, Cambridge University Press.

Smith, N.J. 2015. “Colorspacious’s documentation.” https://colorspacious.readthedocs.org/en/latest.

Smith, N.J., and S. van der Walt. 2015. “mpl colormaps.” http://bids.github.io/colormap.

Spence, I., N. Kutlesa, and D.L. Rose. 1999. Using color to code quantity in spatial displays. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 5(4):393–412.

Stauffer, R., G.J. Mayr, M. Dabernig, and A. Zeileis. 2015. Somewhere over the rainbow: How to make effective use of colors in meteorological visualizations. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 96(2):203–216, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00155.1.

Stevens, J.C., and L.E. Marks. 1965. Cross-modality matching of brightness and loudness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 54(2):407–411.

Tufte, E.R. 1983. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Graphics Press.

Ware, C. 1988. Color sequences for univariate maps: Theory, experiments and principles. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 8(5):41–49, https://doi.org/10.1109/38.7760.

Copyright & Usage

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.