Standardizing NWS Color Tables — A Grassroots Effort

The National Weather Service (NWS) produces a large amount of communication information in both text and visual formats. Over the past several years, the NWS has made a concerted effort to improve consistency among its products and services. Forecasters regularly create graphics to support a wide range of decision support services and forecast operations with many including corresponding maps. Several internal graphics creation software platforms have been created to help forecasters quickly generate these maps. In February 2015, a grassroots group was established to help address the issue of consistency among these various graphics-generation platforms with a primary focus on color tables. As part of the effort, the group has also made it a priority to incorporate established color science schemes used in cartography in order to produce maps that are understandable to the general public, not just meteorologists.

This presentation will highlight the work accomplished to date with output from a variety of real-world examples. Preliminary feedback will also be discussed. The presentation will describe future plans of the group as well as expansion into other National Weather Service products and services.