It's #FigureFriday, so let's chat about my favorite subject: color palettes 🎨 for climate science visualization! (1/12)

First, why is it important? Put simply: a beautiful figure can communicate your results more effectively than text. It can make a figure more understandable to a public audience. So it is worth it to put care into your figure design. (2/12)
First, if you're plotting up climate model data, especially anomalies, I highly recommend Cynthia Brewer's palettes on ColorBrewer. BrBG is my go-to for precip anomalies, and RdBu is a natural for temperature. (3/12) https://t.co/FiCgxyahIp
The sequential palettes are also great if you've got data going in one direction. Here's the Brewer "blues" at work for a figure showing LGM T change. (4/12)
But what about line graphs? If you are paleoclimatologist like me, you are probably plotting a bunch of squiggly lines. For this, I suggest designing a palette for your *entire paper* ahead on time, and then plot stuff in this palette in every figure. (5/12)
My favorite tool for palette design is Coolors (thanks @talia_and for the tip!). This awesome app helps you design palettes with colors that harmonize. (6/12) https://t.co/HIirTdAgKd
For example, here is the Coolors palette I designed for our Review paper in @ScienceMagazine. I wanted to use bold colors that also harmonized with Brewer colors for the global maps in the paper. (7/12)
Coolors allows you to dynamically check color-blind compatibility, but I also love Color Oracle for this, which flips everything on your computer screen to color-blind views. (8/12) https://t.co/w2XREsQeXD
Here's a figure from our Past Climates review on the Coolors palette, in real color, and then what it looks it for folks with deuteranopia (red-green) color blindness. (9/12)
I don't always choose bold colors...sometimes I'm interested in softer looks...like here is a blue-brown gradient palette I'm working on for an upcoming paper. It just depends on what suits your work. (10/12)
Another source for color ideas is cpt-city. Many of these palettes are for graphic design, but it has the NCAR NCL palettes, cmocean palettes from @thyngkm, various semi- and continuous- versions of the Brewer palettes, and many other jewels (11/12) https://t.co/1RYQH1iT0i
Anyway, hope these tips help! What are your favorite color palettes? I'm always looking for good ideas. (12/12) 🌟

More from Climate change

I previously 👇 documented 20 mechanisms through which climate change is 𝘢𝘭𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺 disrupting food production.

Below I am adding to the list including several newly documented mechanisms. 

 *thread*


Several primary impacts relate to altered soil & plant chemistry & biology:

1. Disruption of the phosphorous cycle - the second most vital element for plants after nitrogen


2. Decreased content of key nutrients in major

3. Reduced chill hours required for many plants to bloom normally in the

Other additional primary impacts include:

4. Fossil fuel pollution impacts on crops - this is not a result of climate change per se, but is included since it is due to the same root cause (fossil fuel use):
I don't have time to make this detailed, but here's a little thread about the world's first major politically-charged blackout that was blamed on renewables, in South Australia, in 2016............

On September 28, 2016, an unprecedented tropical storm progressed rapidly across South Australia. Truly - this thing was unusual. The sky folded in on itself. It tore towns to bits.


Australia's @climatecouncil pointed out that the storm was so unusual at least partly due to the influence of climate change, and that this is due to get worse.

https://t.co/76ekkfJpR8


I'm going to use brief snippets from my book to fill this out! The storm's primary impact on the grid was the destruction of several major transmission lines. When I say destruction - I mean they snapped like twigs.


Here's what happened in the following seconds:

- A voltage spike from the line falls
- Wind turbines automatically shut off due to software settings that trigger shutdown during a spike
- The interconnector to Vic tried to compensate, failed and died
- All of SA blacked out

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