Plasma
plasma (matplotlib — van der Walt & Smith)
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#0d0887 -
#5e01a6 -
#9c179e -
#cc4778 -
#ed7953 -
#fdb42f -
#f0f921
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
Plasma runs deep blue-purple through magenta and orange to bright yellow, the most colorful of the four perceptually uniform matplotlib maps. Smith and van der Walt generated it with the same viscm tooling as viridis, optimizing for uniform lightness and a smooth path through CIELAB, and released it CC0 along with the rest.
When to use it
A good pick when you want viridis' rigour but the map is already green — landcover, vegetation, forestry — and a green data ramp would collide. Its hue span is wide enough that readers can name individual classes, which helps when the legend is far from the feature of interest. The saturated middle is heavy: on a busy basemap, drop opacity rather than adding classes.
License
CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication) · source
The color specification carries this license, which is separate from the MIT license on this site. See attribution.