Thermal
cmocean (Thyng et al. 2016) — thermal
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#042333 -
#2e3397 -
#744992 -
#b15f82 -
#eb7958 -
#fbb43d -
#e8fa5b
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
Thermal is cmocean's sea-temperature ramp, running near-black blue through purple and orange to a pale yellow-green. cmocean is Kristen Thyng's set of perceptually uniform colormaps built for oceanographic variables and described in "True colors of oceanography" (Thyng, Greene, Hetland, Zimmerle and DiMarco, Oceanography 29(3), 2016). The whole set is MIT-licensed and each map is named for the quantity it was designed to carry.
When to use it
Built for sea surface temperature and it still reads best there: cold is dark and deep, warm is bright, and the ramp never inverts that reading. It transfers cleanly to any land-side quantity with a temperature-like meaning. It is one of the loudest maps in this family, so put it on a plain basemap and let the coastline do the orientation work.
License
MIT · source
The color specification carries this license, which is separate from the MIT license on this site. See attribution.