Reverse rainbow color scale from scale_colour_gradientn

[Kevin Stierhoff]

I am trying to plot water temperature data, symbolized using scale_colour_gradientn(colours = rainbow(10)). The plot is perfect, except that the cool temperatures are red and warm temperatures are violet (opposite of what's intuitive). 

Is there an argument that will flip the colors, or is another palette that is better to use for temperature data?

[baptiste auguie]

colours = rev(rainbow(10)) ?

HTH,

b.

On 12 July 2013 01:25, Kevin Stierhoff <kevin.s...@gmail.com> wrote:

I am trying to plot water temperature data, symbolized using scale_colour_gradientn(colours = rainbow(10)). The plot is perfect, except that the cool temperatures are red and warm temperatures are violet (opposite of what's intuitive). 

Is there an argument that will flip the colors, or is another palette that is better to use for temperature data?

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[Nicole K.S. Barker]

The rainbow palette is generally not recommended (e.g., http://www.research.ibm.com/people/l/lloydt/color/color.HTM). 

You can make your own colour palette using the colorRampPalette function: http://www.inside-r.org/r-doc/grDevices/colorRampPalette

Here are some example colour schemes http://geography.uoregon.edu/datagraphics/color_scales.htm.

RColorBrewer has some built in colour schemes you can use to create palettes: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RColorBrewer/RColorBrewer.pdf

Nicole

[Kevin Stierhoff - NOAA Federal]

Thank you Nicole, for your response and for links to some very interesting articles on the topic. I learned to use colorRampPalette not long after my post, and got it to work for me. Since I am making exploratory plots of temperature in the range of 12-20C, I think the rainbow (or rev(rainbow), in this case) will suffice. I will, however, give more thought to colors that I choose!

Kevin

Kevin Stierhoff
Research Fisheries Biologist
NOAA Fisheries-SWFSC

8901 La Jolla Shores Dr.

La Jolla, CA 92037 
Kevin.S...@noaa.gov
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http://swfsc.noaa.gov/