Haline
cmocean (Thyng et al. 2016) — haline
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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
Haline is the salinity map from cmocean, climbing deep indigo through blue and green to a pale yellow. It is the map Thyng et al. use in the cmocean documentation to demonstrate the family's properties — even perceptual deltas, clean grayscale conversion, and a smooth path through 3D colorspace. MIT-licensed, from the matplotlib/cmocean repository.
When to use it
Designed for salinity and estuarine mixing, where the blue-to-green-to-yellow progression matches the fresh-to-salty intuition people already have from mixing diagrams. Off the water it works for any concentration-like variable that should read as "more dissolved stuff". The pale yellow top merges with sand and beach fills on standard basemaps — check your style before assuming the top class is visible.
License
MIT · source
The color specification carries this license, which is separate from the MIT license on this site. See attribution.