“Global warming is turning the volume of extreme weather up, Spinal-Tap-style, to 11.”
“The temperature forecast for next Monday by Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology is so unprecedented – over 52C – that it has had to add a new colour to the top of its scale, a suitably incandescent purple.” [The Guardian]
They didn’t need the new color. The forecast proved wrong. The old record stands.
Yes, they used a topographic colour map instead of the more conventional “heat map”.
This story is dancing around the embarassing fact that some data wonk at the BoM did not have the foresight to design a graphic color scale that would accommodate historically unprecedented but not unforeseeable temperatures.
A co-worker in our graphics design department pointed out that this scale also uses non-intuitive colors which makes for awkward interpretation.