Curl
cmocean (Thyng et al. 2016) — curl
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#151d44 -
#156d73 -
#7db390 -
#fef6f5 -
#db8c77 -
#9d3060 -
#340d35
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
Curl is the second cmocean diverging map, teal on one arm and rose-to-plum on the other, designed for vorticity and other rotational fields where the sign is a direction rather than a magnitude. Its upstream table is 512 rows rather than the family's usual 256 — the subsample rule is index-based, so both produce the same 7 evenly spaced stops. MIT-licensed.
When to use it
The right diverging map when red and blue would be misread as good and bad — rotation, flow direction, net flux, in and out. Because both arms end dark, it holds up on mid-tone basemaps better than balance does. Pair it with an explicit legend: the teal-versus-rose convention is not one most readers arrive with.
License
MIT · source
The color specification carries this license, which is separate from the MIT license on this site. See attribution.