Thread: RELEASE new color options for spectrogram plots

Started: 2019-11-01 12:21:02
Last activity: 2019-11-01 12:21:02
Topics: MUSTANG QA
autumn@iris.washington.edu
2019-11-01 12:21:02
Dear MUSTANG Users,

We are happy to announce new color options for the spectrogram plots, available on the MUSTANG noise-spectrogram service and the ’spectrogram’ endpoint of the MUSTANG noise-pdf-browser service.

We now offer 7 different color schemes: along with the familiar rainbow palette, we provide ColorBrewer palettes RdYlBu, RdBu, BrBG, YlGnBu, OrRd and Matplotlib palette viridis. These new palettes afford a variety of benefits, and increase the usability of the service in a number of ways:

Greyscale printing. The OrRd palette provides a uniform luminance gradient which means that spectrograms created with this palette can be included in black and white publications or photocopied as handouts for a classroom. This is a lossless conversion that maintains the character and constitution of the color coded data.
Colorblind-friendly schemes. Spectrograms are now accessible to those in our community with color vision deficiencies, including the various forms of colorblindness and monochromatic vision. We hope to continue this trend towards improved accessibility in future releases.
Sequential and diverging scales. To increase the clarity of the color coded data, we now offer scales suited for particular types of datasets. You will find that some palettes optimize for recognition of certain noise characteristics and changes and provide smoother interpolation and meaningful hue variance around values of interest.

For a full list of the new palettes available, visit: http://service.iris.edu/mustang/noise-spectrogram/1.

For a full description of these options, visit: http://service.iris.edu/mustang/noise-spectrogram/docs/1/help/#plot.color.

This functionality also extends to the spectrograms produced by our noise-pdf-browser web service; usage details here: http://service.iris.edu/mustang/noise-pdf-browser/1/.


Best,
Autumn Johnson
IRIS Quality Assurance
08:29:34 v.01697673