Color Scales

[dsgrimmer]

Hi! I'm looking into the differences between ocean color captured by MODIS Aqua and Seahawk Hawkeye but noticed that the color scale as shown on Ocean Color Web goes up to 60 mg/m^3, but in the SeaDAS program, the scale's limit is 20 mg/m^3. Which scale is accurate, and how come they are different? Please let me know, thanks so much!

[OB SeaDAS - xuanyang02]

If you are talking about the Range for Color Manipulation, you can change the Max value as you need.

[gnwiii]

the color scale as shown on Ocean Color Web goes up to 60 mg/m^3, but in the SeaDAS program, the scale's limit is 20 mg/m^3. Which scale is accurate, and how come they are different?

The choice of scale depends on the data. As noted by @xuanyang02 , you can make your own choice, although there are advantages to sticking with the ranges used for similar data in public archives.

Open ocean data averaged over time and at lower resolutions will have lower maximum values, so a 20 mg/m^3 upper bound misses very few pixels in global level-3 mapped data. Values over 20 are not unusual for individual level-2 files, particularly for coastal areas. Sometimes you want to highlight a feature such as an eddie and may want to chose a range that makes the feature easy to see in printed publications.
mg/m^3

[dsgrimmer]

Thanks so much for the feedback!