Colourizing a trajectory

[This article was first published on Dan Kelley Blog/R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Introduction

In Oceanography it can be useful to use colour to display z values along an (x,y) trajectory. For example, CTD data might be displayed in this way, with x being distance along track, y being depth, and z being temperature. This post shows how one might do this.

Methods

The R code given below demonstrates this with fake data. The core idea is to use segments(), here with head() and tail() to chop up the trajectory.

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
library(oce)
x <- 1:50
y <- x * 2/10 + x^2/10
z <- seq(0, 5, length.out = length(x))
zlim <- range(z)
npalette <- 10

palette <- oceColorsJet(npalette)
drawPalette(zlim = zlim, col = palette)
plot(x, y, type = "l")
segments(head(x, -1), head(y, -1),
  tail(x, -1), tail(y, -1),
  col = palette[findInterval(z, 
    seq(zlim[1], zlim[2], length.out = npalette))],
  lwd = 10)
points(x, y, pch = 20)

Results

The graph shows that this works reasonably well. The dots will probably not be useful in an actual application, and are used here just to indicate colourization in groups.

graph

The method works well, and is flexible in terms of colour schemes.

Exercises

Find a way to blend colour between the points, perhaps by defining a euclidian distance in (x,y) space (which will of course require scaling if x and y have different units or ranges) and then using approx().

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Dan Kelley Blog/R.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Never miss an update!
Subscribe to R-bloggers to receive
e-mails with the latest R posts.
(You will not see this message again.)

Click here to close (This popup will not appear again)