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Channel: Doug McNeall – Better Figures
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Hello world!

Hello world

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Visualising Ensembles

In climate science, an ensemble is the term for a collection of climate model runs. The idea is that each run is different in some cruicial factor; the ensemble gives you a handle on how that factor...

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Decadal Temperatures

My colleague John Kennedy has asked for some feedback on this figure, showing the evolution of global average temperatures, since the 1850s. The data is from HadCRUT3, and is averaged into decades. I...

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Drought small multiple

A playful look at a serious subject from Mike Bostock. He uses a small multiple, animated over each year, to show the impact and context of this year’s drought in the US. Click the image to see the...

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Better Palettes

Earlier this week, we were treated to some lovely unadulterated* sciency data, in the shape of a map of sea level rise in the last 18 years. The story got good coverage  in the mainstream media, and an...

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Oh No, FAO

Oh FAO. I admire your work immensely, and respect your mission and commitment. I applaud your lovely FAOSTAT service, and you can clearly do nice, informative graphs. So, how did you let this...

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Too much information?

Do GCM’s (sic) predict the climate… or macroweather? Ask Lovejoy et. al, in a paper submitted to Earth System Science Dynamics Discussions, and pointed out to Better Figures by the unholy trio of...

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The pump handle

Every so often, a graphic comes along that does something so nicely, that it would seem churlish to criticise it. This is one of those times. So, we take our hats off to the people at the Earth System...

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How to strip meaning from graphs

A fantastic example of how to strip meaning from a graph this week, in this little beauty from Christopher Booker in the Telegraph. “Look at the graph” he says “to see the evidence of global warming”....

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Better Timeseries

Better Figures was very happy to be invited to the Scott Polar Research Institute, to give a talk on data visualisation to the UK Polar network of early career scientists. The talk leant heavily on the...

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Projection distortion

A quick fix to a map today, courtesy of Ed Hawkins over at better figures-approved blog Climate Lab Book. Ed asked “When will we reach 2°C?“, and posted this great map, showing areas of the world that...

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End of the rainbow

Note: Better Figures is proud to support Ed Hawkins at Climate Lab Book, in calling for an end to the “Rainbow” palette. The text of an open letter to the climate science community, led by Ed, is...

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Making Better Figures [Video]

Better Figures made a video! The video offers some tips for making better figures. We cover: A brief history of statistical graphics [02:20] Everybody loves a bad figure [08:10] Some principles [11:35]...

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Picking a colour scale for scientific graphics

Here are some recommendations for making scientific graphics which help your audience understand your data as easily as possible. Your graphics should be striking, readily understandable, should avoid...

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A welcome development for matplotlib

Here is a great video, describing viridis, the new default colourmap for matplotlib in the programming language Python. This has some great features – It’s perceptually uniform across its range, it’s...

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All the rules you could need

People like to put together lists of rules for making better visualisations. In the published literature, I can find a couple of good examples. Rougier et al. (2014) offers some high level advice and...

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Joaquin In Rainbows

At the time of writing, the US media is tracking Hurricane Joaquin, and trying to predict whether it will make landfall in the US over the next few days. There are lots of great visualisations, but one...

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Better Figures does RMetS at the ECMWF

That’s Royal Meterological Society at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting. We had an afternoon of Visualisation of Meterological data, part of the ECMWF visualisation week, and...

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Legislating for better information design

It turns out that my infant son has a milk allergy (not intolerance). He’ll probably grow out of it, but in the meantime we have to be careful not to feed him anything that might contain cow’s milk....

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A significant achievement

What an achievement! Yesterday, the lovely perceptually accurate open source colour palette, Viridis (we discussed it here) turned up in a major paper. The paper itself was on some gravity discovery or...

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