As a kid, I was obsessed with maps. Give me an atlas and I would be sucked in for hours. Eventually I wound up in coastal engineering and took a GIS course with the amazing Dr. Kate Parks in Southampton. This reignited my interest in cartography, as I now had the tools I needed to make my own maps. Over the coming years this led to an interest in how we can map our coastal regions to better communicate their morphodynamics. Also (mostly), I just wanted to make pretty maps! Making figures sometimes feels like one of the only avenues for artistic expression that we have in science.
To reach these goals, a good colourmap is a key ingredient. For a map showing the topography/bathymetry of a coast, a colourmap is the range of colours that correspond to a particular elevation. In this post, I will walk you through how I created two of my favourite colourmaps.
Continue reading Custom Colourmapping
Coastally Curious 