The Effect of Color Scales on Climate Scientists’ Objective and Subjective Performance in Spatial Data Analysis Tasks

Geographical maps encoded with rainbow color scales are widely used by climate scientists. Despite a plethora of evidence from the visualization and vision sciences literature about the shortcomings of the rainbow color scale, they continue to be preferred over perceptually optimal alternatives. To study and analyze this mismatch between theory and practice, we present a web-based user study that compares the effect of color scales on performance accuracy for climate-modeling tasks. In this study, we used pairs of continuous geographical maps generated using climatological metrics for quantifying pairwise magnitude difference and spatial similarity. For each pair of maps, 39 scientist-observers judged: i) the magnitude of their difference, ii) their degree of spatial similarity, and iii) the region of greatest dissimilarity between them. Besides the rainbow color scale, two other continuous color scales were chosen such that all three of them covaried two dimensions (luminance monotonicity and hue banding), hypothesized to have an impact on task performance. We also analyzed subjective performance measures, such as user confidence, perceived accuracy, preference, and familiarity in using the different color scales. We found that monotonic luminance scales produced significantly more accurate judgments of magnitude difference but were not superior in spatial comparison tasks, and that hue banding had differential effects based on the task and conditions. Scientists expressed the highest preference and perceived confidence and accuracy with the rainbow, despite its poor performance on the magnitude comparison tasks. We also report on interesting interactions among stimulus conditions, tasks, and color scales, that lead to open research questions.

1 Introduction

There is often a mismatch between visualization research and visualization practice in scientific domains. In this paper, we focus on one of the most popular, and often debated, mismatches: the use of the rainbow color scale as a means of communication and analysis of scientific data. In particular, we focus on the use of color scales in climate science, where they play a pivotal role. Climate being an inherently geographical/spatial (and temporal) phenomenon, scientists often produce maps to convey information about how measures of interest distribute spatially across the globe or other regions of interest.