Brown–Teal
ColorBrewer 2.0 (Brewer & Harrower)
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#a6611a -
#dfc27d -
#f5f5f5 -
#80cdc1 -
#018571
On a map
A synthetic demo grid, classed with equal intervals — the point is the palette against real basemap ink, not the data. Switch themes to see how much basemap the palette leaves room for.
Metadata
Provenance
BrBG is a diverging scheme from ColorBrewer, Cynthia Brewer and Mark Harrower's palette system built at Penn State and published online in 2002. It is one of the schemes Brewer's testing marked as safe under color vision deficiency, because it opposes brown against teal rather than red against green. That brown-to-teal axis has since become a convention in hydrology and land-surface mapping, where it reads as dry against wet.
When to use it
Brown–Teal suits asymmetric crossings — drought indices, moisture deficit and surplus, erosion versus deposition — where the two arms cover different data ranges and you want the midpoint pinned rather than centered. Because it is CVD-safe it is a reliable substitute for Red–Blue whenever accessibility is a requirement. Its off-white midpoint blends into pale basemaps, so on a light style add a thin polygon outline to keep near-zero features from disappearing.
License
Apache-style ColorBrewer License (attribution required) · source
The color specification carries this license, which is separate from the MIT license on this site. See attribution.