The Best Color Scale? Not Rainbow

Image from Borland and Taylor (2007).

Even though rainbow color maps look pretty, Borland and Taylor (2007; pdf) argue that they’re rarely the best choice for showing data.

The rainbow color map confuses viewers through its lack of perceptual ordering, obscures data through its uncontrolled luminance variation, and actively misleads interpretation through the introduction of non-data-dependent gradients.

–Borland and Taylor (2007): Rainbow Color Map (Still) Considered Harmful in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

They recommend the much more boring (but visually useful) greyscale and bi-colored schemes, for things like temperature maps and so on where the data is continuous.

A pretty, but not very informative, rainbow color scale.

Wind Patterns (for the U.S.)

U.S wind patterns (excerpt from April 10th, 2012) HINT.FM

HINT.FM has an amazing animation of winds over the U.S.. A major part of the awesomeness is that it’s updated hourly from the National Weather Service’s weather database, which has an awful lot of excellent data available.