Deep
cmocean (Thyng et al. 2016) — deep
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#fdfecc -
#a3dea6 -
#5dbaa4 -
#488e9e -
#3e6495 -
#3f396c -
#281a2c
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
Deep is cmocean's bathymetry ramp, going pale yellow-green through teal and blue to a very dark purple. It inverts the usual convention deliberately: the shallow end is light, so that a depth map printed at low contrast still shows the shelf. Part of the MIT-licensed cmocean set described in Thyng et al. (2016).
When to use it
For water depth, and for any strictly positive quantity with a long tail where the extreme should feel like a void — dive depth, well depth, drawdown. Unlike Crameri's oleron it makes no attempt to encode a sea-level crossing, so use it for depth only, not for combined terrain. It is dark at the top of the scale and needs light label halos over the deepest classes.
License
MIT · source
The color specification carries this license, which is separate from the MIT license on this site. See attribution.