Enhancing visualizations (colors)

Week 5

Wednesday February 4th, 2026

Six common climate science color palettes.

Fig 4 Appropriate diverging and sequential colour schemes for the following climate data (a), absolute temperature (b), absolute precipitation (c), temperature anomaly (d), precipitation or runoff anomaly (e and f) other climate variables with no symbolic association . Schemes in this figure are 7 class ones designed by Cynthia Brewer, (Brewer et al. 2003) - from Kaye, Hartley & Hemming (2012)

Pre-class Prep

A. Install required packages

install.packages("paletteer") # a comprehensive collection of color palettes in R using a common interface
install.packages("viridis") # Colorblind-Friendly Color Maps for R
install.packages("RColorBrewer") # ColorBrewer Palettes
install.packages("tigris") # for downloading and using Census TIGER/Line shapefiles in R
install.packages("sf") # provides simple features access in R

B. Download data

Save data to your class repo at EDS-240-class-examples/week5/data/:

Lecture Dataset title Download link Notes
5.2 County-level precipitation data (Nov 2020 - Oct 2025) for the contiguous U.S Download the data from the NCEI County Mapping tool by clicking the CSV download button, located beneath the map. The previous link should take you to the correct subset of data, but triple check that the drop down boxes specify Contiguous U.S./Precipitation/2025/October/60-Month and that it says November 2020 - October 2025 Contiguous U.S. Coutny Precipitation above the provided table. In the event that the NCEI County Mapping tool is down, you can access a backup copy on Google Drive NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) archives and provides access to terabytes of climate, coastal, oceanographic, and geophyscial data in a variety of formats

C. Download .qmd templates & review data wrangling code

  1. Download all necessary templates (links in the table below) and save them to a EDS-240-data-viz-examples/week5/ folder.

  2. Review the data wrangling code under the ## Setup section of template 5.2 and make note of any questions you might have (no data wrangling necessary in template 5.1). Due to time constraints, we won’t be live-coding our way through the data wrangling code in class. However, we’ll reserve some time to answer any questions before we jump into data viz .

Lecture Materials

Lecture slides Code-along template Code-along key
Lecture 5.1: colors 5.1 template 5.1 key
Lecture 5.2: choropleth 5.2 template 5.2 key

Pre-lab Prep

TODO
  • make this lab more interactive

A. (OPTIONAL) Bring a cool data viz!

This week’s lab section will be a time to explore, share, and discuss “non-standard” chart types, as well as those that present data using the fundamental chart types we’ve already discussed in different and exciting ways. You’ll have time to browse some data viz during section, but it would be great to bring any inspiring examples you might have come across already.

B. (OPTIONAL) Get yourself a Bluesky account

Bluesky is quickly becoming the Twitter replacement for data science community members to connect, share, and learn together. You can stay up to date on #TidyTuesday submissions and follow many of the great data viz folks in the field. Check out the resources page for more information on how to get started.

Lab Materials

Lab Slides Exercise instructions Exercise solutions
Lab 5 slides: beyond fundamental chart types NA NA

Assignment Reminders

Assignment Type Assignment Title Date Assigned Date Due
FPM Final Project Milestone #2 Wed 01/28/2026 Wed 02/04/2026, 11:59pm PT
SR Mid-course reflection (SR #2) Wed 02/04/2026 Fri 02/06/2026, 11:59pm PT
HW Homework #3 Wed 02/04/2026 Wed 02/11/2026, 11:59pm PT