Color Coding of Large Value Ranges Applied to Meteorological Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new color scheme for visualizing meteorological data with large value ranges, improving interpretation accuracy in scatterplots by emphasizing magnitude differences.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel nested color scheme based on numerical mantissa and exponent, specifically designed for large value range data visualization in meteorology.

Findings

Significantly improves interpretation accuracy over existing color schemes.

Performs comparably to state-of-the-art schemes in discrimination tasks.

Effective for emphasizing magnitude differences in meteorological scatterplots.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel color scheme designed to address the challenge of visualizing data series with large value ranges, where scale transformation provides limited support. We focus on meteorological data, where the presence of large value ranges is common. We apply our approach to meteorological scatterplots, as one of the most common plots used in this domain area. Our approach leverages the numerical representation of mantissa and exponent of the values to guide the design of novel "nested" color schemes, able to emphasize differences between magnitudes. Our user study evaluates the new designs, the state of the art color scales and representative color schemes used in the analysis of meteorological data: ColorCrafter, Viridis, and Rainbow. We assess accuracy, time and confidence in the context of discrimination (comparison) and interpretation (reading) tasks. Our proposed color scheme significantly outperforms the others in interpretation tasks, while showing comparable performances in discrimination tasks.