Balance
cmocean (Thyng et al. 2016) — balance
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#181c43 -
#0a60be -
#75aabe -
#f1eceb -
#d08b73 -
#a52125 -
#3c0912
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
Balance is cmocean's blue-white-red diverging map, built for free-surface height anomaly and other signed ocean fields. It is the perceptually uniform version of the convention everyone already reads — cool means below, warm means above — with the two arms matched in lightness so neither side looks more extreme than it is. MIT-licensed (Thyng et al., 2016).
When to use it
For any signed anomaly where the audience already expects red and blue: sea level, temperature departure, budget surplus and deficit. The near-white center is the trap — put your no-data class in a visibly different treatment, and make sure the middle break is exactly zero. On a light basemap the neutral band vanishes, which is fine when "no change" should recede and wrong when it should not.
License
MIT · source
The color specification carries this license, which is separate from the MIT license on this site. See attribution.