Every now and then, the geophysics community debates furiously about which colormap is best to display geophysical data. This is not a new issue and the starting point for this discussion seems to be roughly 1996 when Rogowitz and Treinish started to question the use of rainbow-like colormaps for scientific visualisation. […]
Potential Field
Introduction Mapping the depth of the oceans globally was one of the greatest successes of geophysics in the 20th century. Without bathymetry, we would not know the locations of mid-ocean ridges, volcanic seamounts, and transform faults, to name a few, all of which are key elements of plate tectonics. But […]
Summary Hillshading simulates the variable illumination of a surface by a directional light source. It is a great method to represent relief on a map and it works very well with potential field data too, not only with topographic data. Creating shaded maps in Python with matplotlib is easy and a few examples are provided […]
Summary When displaying geophysical data in a map, one may find it difficult to show both the presence of extremes and the subtle variations in the background signal. Histogram equalization is there to help, as it redistributes intensities and increases the contrast. In this new implementation for Python and matplotlib, the equalization is applied […]