After a 'complaint' that temperatures we ... / 2008-05-19

After a 'complaint' that temperatures were mapped to almost the same shades of green I tried to find a better way to map temperatures to colours for the weather maps on http://weather.idefix.net. What I learned sofar: visualizing temperatures in an easy to understand way is quite hard. The human perception is that blue is cold and red is hot. The current mapping uses that to map temperature to Hue values and use the resulting HSV colour (after conversion to RGB). Adding a legend showing what temperature maps to what colour helps a bit, but with the Netherlands being not too big an area for weather and with usually not much differences in temperature I keep ending up with close shades of the same colour. Interesting problem, and I can't find any published work about this sofar. Lots of research in 3d weather visualization, but no temperature to colour mapping information.