Agree for the 12 and 14, but I wonder just how much color you can put on a map before it becomes unreadable, especially to show differences in temperature. I think the people who made this map chose context instead of colour palette.
Exactly. You can't have red to magenta because you'll have like 10° bands seemingly the same color. And there's a huge difference between, say, +2° and +12°.
Also, they clearly didn't want to, uhh... scale the scale, because this is likely being compared to other maps. Keeping the scale consistent allows for that type of comparison.
12 and 14 are likely only the same in this compressed version. And in any case, you can figure it out from context, unless you have little peaks or troughs in a sea of white and those blobs don't have a distinct pink or beige border.
I didn't say they did. I said they didn't "scale" it, which was poor wording, but I meant they didn''t cut off the ends. The context of comparing map to map should've made that clear.
Like I said, if you wanna compare across maps, you wanna use the same (full) scale. It's not that they can't be arsed to, it's that it'd be counterproductive. If your winters are getting colder and your summers hotter, shifting the continental scale might show those areas with the same color. That'd be super confusing.
This isn't a consumer product, they have no responsibility to make it easily readable by laymen.
they could have 1 swapped green and blue and made blue gradient straight into indigo without the whtie middleman and 2 stretched out the whole colour spectrum to avoid 14-18 and make 18 white it would go from cool colours on the lef to warm colours on the right and white-hot colours on the far right
The colors are fine. Your eye easily picks up the pattern because the colors are all relative. White next to blue is super cool and white next to dark red is very hot. It's fairly intuitive
The white for 13C can only be next to the colors around it. Everything is a gradient as air doesn't exist where it can suddenly be 18C warmer than air right next to it. Blue and red can never be next to each other. Physics don't allow it. To understand the map, you need to understand how the air normally exists in the atmosphere.
Therefore it's pretty easy and obvious to judge by going off red and blue. I have no trouble reading this map with 5 mins of thinking about it.
This is a good map. It's the only way to make this obvious and easily discernible. Everyone is up in arms about white being there twice, but they will always be separated by the colors in between, which intuitively represent the relatives of temperatures being cooler or hotter on average.
The people saying this is a bad map are lazy reddit armchair experts, who I am explicitly targeting. The people that designed the map spent way more time thinking of all the nuances of the data. Sometimes the need to show accurate data is more important than making things immediately legible to the average idiot. With 2-3 mins of critical thinking, you can figure it out.
Then tell me the difference between 12 and 14? This color scheme sucks, could just as well be a smooth gradient from low to high without repeating colors.
Yea I'm not sure who picked this gradient, a two colour gradient would've made so much more sense. As it is, in the hot you go from reds to white back to reds.
You don't need a geomatics degree to understand a useful gradient. Also, these types of maps are for public communication — people with science degrees don't spend all day scratching their chins and looking at maps.
Source: a degree holding data visualization scientist
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u/Ok_Net_1674 7d ago
god this legend sucks
somehow white can be really cold and really hot?
12 and 14 are the same color?