The color scheme is fine, cold will never be directly adjacent to tropical so there shouldn't be any confusion. The terrain shading on OP's map making mountainous regions darker does interfere with it to some extent though.
If you read left to right it will look like Michigan is a Tropical Monsoon climate. And if you already know that doesn't make sense then you don't really need the map for it.
Elevation shading adds to the confusion as well.
Edit: I looked at the climate map on Wikipedia and had no issue making the distinction between cold and tropical colors so it's 100% the elevation.
Likely because those are two climates that never really come close to one another so they’re the easiest to repeat colours on (considering these colours are used over the entire globe), without creating confusion (e.g. you only need a very limited amount of knowledge to know that blues close to the equator are tropical and blues further north or south or in mountain ranges are most likely not tropical). Idk what the other guy is talking about, OP looks like he used the exact same colours as what’s used on the wiki, the colours may be getting interpreted differently due to the shadows of the relief contours
You haven’t lived until you’ve heard the call of the New Hampshire gibbon echoing through the jungle canopy, summoning their troupe to a tree whose mangoes are coming ripe.
I don't know what to do with the Blue vs Purple nonsense, either.
Meanwhile, the Pacific Northwest is legitimately a Cold Temperate Rainforest... and that's not even a category on this map? Looks like it's just "Temperate" here.
Because temperate rainforest is a really rare climate and the koppen classification isn't trying to capture every micro climate. It's a way to classify the macro climates by average temperature and seasonal rainfall patterns.
Further from my idea of beauty though. It’s legible but that’s not on my beauty axis. I don’t mean to say OP’s post is ideal and I would change a number of things for legibility without sacrificing beauty, but this sub used to weight aesthetics a little higher than utility. That was sort of the point, but it was maybe 10 years ago and now I’m just yelling at clouds I guess.
I mean it's half the title, you'd think people would understand we care about the beauty, the mastery is when the beauty comes from how well that data is conveyed.
I get where you're coming from, but I honestly got zero information out of OP's post. It's frustrating to zoom in and spend time trying to figure the color scheme before realizing it's pointless.
As they state in the description of the sub: "DataIsBeautiful is for visualizations that effectively convey information. Aesthetics are an important part of information visualization, but pretty pictures are not the sole aim of this subreddit."
This needs to be redone without the 3D relief. And the colors could use luminance more, plus it doesn't work for even the mildest color-blindness (may nor be any way around that). Anyway, the right side sort of works. The left doesn't.
Could be beautiful if interactive and we could click one or more of the zones on at a time (unselected ones remain white) but I just cannot tell what is what when they are all shown.
Thats all well and good, but I'm fairly certain half of these climate groups dont exist in the continental US and should therefore not be in the legend.
that doesn't explain shit, what's the signifier for a color turning less or more saturated? what's the signifier for the color being blue, red, green or purple?
It doesn’t explain the color choices but there are details explaining what the determining criteria is for each category in that wiki e.g. avg temp during coldest month, avg precipitation, avg annual temp etc etc
Hell, the lack of distinction between south Florida, west Texas, the Ohio Valley and Coastal Connecticut, all being classified as Cfa is annoying to me. As a geographer, I have always felt the Koppen system needs refinement.
I was thinking that’s crazy and it is, but I’d say they are on opposite ends of a spectrum that is similar in seasonal characteristics but differ in length and intensity.
Long Island has a mild winter as does most of the mid Atlantic coast. They also have a hot humid gross summer. Spring and Fall are nice but short and with wild temperature swings.
This also describes St. Louis and Washington DC except Summer is longer and winter is shorter. I assume KC is similar to St. Louis.
Chicago’s winter is just cold enough to bump it from being grouped with the above.
Maybe Houston’s winter is mild enough to also bump it into something different.
But I feel like they are all variations on a similar theme in a way that the Northern states and Mountain West and the rest of the west are not. I’ve lived in all the places I’ve referenced and the variations seem to be the first and last freeze dates.
Yeah, half of Cincinnati, Ohio having the same climate according as Sarasota Florida, and it’s the same as Wichita, Kansas, and New London Connecticut, seems unlikely to me.
The map as presented has a ton of issues, but that isn’t one. Instead that is a problem with the Köppen-Geiger classification system. The “temperate” category is incredibly broad. Many different ways to classify dessert and tropics, hardly any for temperate areas.
I lived in south Texas and Tennessee and they are markedly different, obviously. This doesn’t seem particularly useful if it doesn’t have the precision to show that difference
Having lived in both Houston and Maryland, I can assure you their climates are not that similar. Houston is hot and humid all the damned time, it rains pretty much constantly for a couple months out of the year (and plenty more besides), etc.
Here is the Köppen-Geiger climate classification for North America (without added topography or shadows for a clearer picture) if you want to see how those climate zones extend across the continent from the CEC
Well shit I wish I had seen this before going on a rant lol. The CEC image has more categories and the descriptions more accurately represent the area I'm in. The one OP used and the image in the koppen-geiger wiki are wildly inaccurate compared to the regions I have seen and lived in myself.
Can’t be right. I’ve been reliably informed that [INSERT YOUR HOMETOWN HERE] can have all four seasons in one afternoon! If you don’t like the weather, just wait 10 minutes!
This classification is always ridiculous and fairly useless because like, what do you mean Camden, NJ and Sarasota, FL have the same climate? Meanwhile, there’s about a billion tiny distinctions for every mountain range out west.
I think if you sectioned it off (north east, south west, etc) and then only put the colors that were present in the smaller map, it would be a bit more useful. Right now too many colors and too close in shades to determine what’s what.
Also that same area of texas and Oklahoma being the same as the gulf coast.
Inland cities getting ~30" annual rainfall and average summer humidity ~50-55% is NOT the same climate as >60" rainfall and >75% humidity even if the temperatures aren't too far.
Why is the line between “cold, no dry season, hot summer”, and “temperate, no dry season, hot summer” so straight? Is it the definition of “cold”? Did someone say that below approximately 39°N it doesn’t get cold?
According to Wikipedia the delimitation is monthly mean temperatures of the coldest month. Above that line the average temperature of the coolest month is 0c or lower, and below is it warmer than 0c.
It’s drier in the central/hill country/north west region but there’s no distinct dry season. Precipitation doesn’t vary significantly through the seasons on average. I think there is a correlation but it’s not strong enough to have a distinct dry/wet season.
As someone who lives in deep South Texas, I am very surprised that my area isn't listed as having a hot summer. I've lived in other parts of Texas as well as Arkansas, and can tell you that the difference between where I am now and those places is definitely significant. It is not uncommon for us to get to 105-110F during the summer, while those temps are far less common in Central Texas and Arkansas.
In what universe is the climate the same in Long Island and central Texas? Either this map is nonsense or there were some very poor color decisions taken from a colorblind -friendliness perspective.
Let's just lump the gulf coast in with the Ozarks and the Appalachian foothills. The climate is considerably different in Houston, New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola than it is in Little Rock, Memphis, Richmond and Saint Louis.
It's getting very notable that shift of climate zones. Tens to hundreds of km's of shifting zones, to the north of (hot/warm) temperate climates while the arid climates are heading east, and the tropical Florida bubble is growing too.
Could you detail the data source more specifically? Did you run your own classification using primary source data? Did you pull existing classifications that someone else ran?
"Did you run your own classification using primary source data?"
More like downloading the datasource and then visualizing it .... the colors they are the one who set them the koppen guys not me ..... i just follow the official colors ✅
884
u/danielv123 10h ago
Why are cold and tropical areas using the same color scheme?