Robert Simmon
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rsimmon.bsky.social
Robert Simmon
@rsimmon.bsky.social
5.6K followers 1.1K following 2.1K posts
Data Visualization. Ex-Planet & NASA Earth Observatory. Blue Marble, Earth at Night, color, cartography, occasionally skewed views of Earth. Looking for a job.
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rsimmon.bsky.social
Post a ship that’s not #StarTrek or #StarWars
Nighttime launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery. The rocket plume is so bright it blows out the camera. Smoke rises to either side of the ascending Shuttle, and light is reflected off water in the foreground.
February 7, 2026 at 12:43 AM
rsimmon.bsky.social
Last year, Vantor (née Maxar, née Digital Globe) and China’s Chang Guang Satellite Co. got into a game of one-upmanship imaging reconnaissance satellites from orbit.
Satellite image of a satellite, with a resolution of 1.9 centimeters per pixel. Satellite image of a satellite, resolution unknown.
February 2, 2026 at 9:22 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
This is neat. SatVu is using their high-resolution thermal infrared satellite imagery to monitor data center activity. www.satellitevu.com/news/satvu-r...

🛰️🔥
Thermal infrared and visible images of a data center (Bitcoin mine) in Texas. Annotated thermal infrared satellite image of a data center in Texas.
February 2, 2026 at 9:05 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
I made some maps to help @climate.us explain how we’re still getting winter storms — sometimes big ones! — despite Global Warming. www.climate.us/news-and-fea...
Map of snowfall totals in the contiguous United States for the weekend of January 23–26. A band of accumulation of at least 8 inches stretched from northern Texas to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Map of winter temperature trends in the contiguous United States. In the three-month winter average, it’s warming everywhere (red). In the single month averages there are some small cooling regions (light blue) including the extreme Pacific Northwest in December and the Mississippi Delta in January.
February 2, 2026 at 8:55 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
To give a sense of scale to the peat mining detailed by @elisewang.bsky.social here’s are Sentinel-2 satellite images of the (red) peat bogs near Athlone, Ireland, compared to New York City at the same scale (15 × 15 km).

bsky.app/profile/elis...
Satellite image of peat bogs near Athlone, Ireland collected on July 10, 2018. The dark red bogs stand out against the beige and green fields. A dark blue river meanders through the center of the scene. Satellite image of New York City, collected on June 15, 2025. Except for water (the East River, Hudson River, and New York Harbor) and a handful of parks, the entire area is urbanized.
January 30, 2026 at 6:29 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
Huh. New York Times snow forecast graphic from yesterday vs. today.
3-day snow accumulation forecast graphic from yesterday (January 22) with a palette that resets from dark blue to light yellow at the boundary between 4–6 and 6–8 inches of accumulation. This over-emphasizes the transition and may cause confusion. 3-day snow accumulation forecast from today (January 23rd) with a revised palette that changes hue from blue to purple as predicted snowfall increases. The transition from 4–6 to 6–8 inches is now smooth.
January 23, 2026 at 7:00 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
If you’re picking colors with a tool that has precise control over hue, chroma, and lightness it’s possible to abruptly shift hue while maintaining even steps in lightness. This creates an unmistakeable transition that’s still monotonic!
Color and grayscale versions of the same map. A shift from blue to purple emphasizes the change from moderate to severe snowfall, but still changes lightness consistently.
January 23, 2026 at 4:20 AM
rsimmon.bsky.social
While we’re being bombarded with weather maps, I thought I’d revisit one of my favorite color palette tricks. Sometimes it’s important to emphasize a boundary, perhaps between moderate (< 6") and severe (>8") snowfall. You could reset the palette, like the NYT, but there’s a better way.

📊🗺️🎨
3-day snow accumulation forecast with a palette that resets from dark blue to light yellow at the boundary between 4–6 and 6–8 inches accumulation. This over-emphasizes the transition and may cause confusion.
January 23, 2026 at 4:20 AM
rsimmon.bsky.social
Small multiples plotted with a trend line on every graph. Clever! I’m going to steal that idea. #dataviz
Grid of small multiple graphs showing trends in democracy in each nation. Each individual graph includes the U.S. trend as a dotted gray line for comparison.
January 23, 2026 at 2:26 AM
rsimmon.bsky.social
Academic vs. media representations of a new Antarctic under-ice dataset. The sequential (University of Grenoble-Alpes) palette emphasizes overall structure, divergent (BBC) emphasizes the extremes.

From Science & the BBC/@erwanrivault.com

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/
www.bbc.com/news/article...
📊
Map of Antarctica’s under-ice topography with a sequential color palette (viridis, which runs from dark blue (lowest elevations) through green to yellow (highest elevations)). This palette emphasizes the overall structure of elevation, but obscures the line of bedrock between above and below sea level. The relatively "warm" yellow hues for high elevation also help them visually protrude from the "cool", low-elevation blues. Map of Antarctica’s under-ice topography with a divergent color palette (blue shades represent areas below sea level, tan and brown areas above sea level). This clearly shows where the bedrock is below sea level. It also allows the map to blend seamlessly with ocean bathymetry. Since most elevations are only modestly above or below sea level, and are relatively pale, added shaded relief helps accent the topography. The BBC cartographers also included photos to help illustrate what the topography would look like without ice.
January 16, 2026 at 3:09 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
I’m looking for this chart:
Chart of scientifically designed colors for hypsographic tints. Gray > green > yellow > orange > red.
January 14, 2026 at 10:50 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
Look at those colors!

#cartography #dataviz 🗺️📊🎨

www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet...
Vintage maps of rainfall in Europe, North America, Japan, NewZealand, central South America and globally. The color scale ranges from tan (low rainfall) to blue (high rainfall) with nearly perceptual equal steps.
January 14, 2026 at 7:41 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
#mapsinthewild
Wall sized map of the Grand Canyon.
January 11, 2026 at 4:32 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
#mapsinthewild
Photo of a silhouette of named Grand Canyon features against a backdrop of those same features. On top of a stone wall with the barest hint of sunset light on the opposite (North) rim.
January 10, 2026 at 3:23 AM
rsimmon.bsky.social
One of the places in the world that’s instantly recognizable.
The Grand Canyon from the south rim with a thin band of daylight still visible on the opposite side. The sky is a perfectly clear blue and there’s some snow under the pinion pine trees.
January 10, 2026 at 1:42 AM
rsimmon.bsky.social
Still one one my favorite artists. Thanks @greatdismal.bsky.social !
Box by Joseph Cornell. There are a collection of white tchotchkes against a dark blue background in a distressed wood box.
January 8, 2026 at 11:47 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
Interesting to see support for the hypothesis that the rainbow palette isn’t inherently ordered (the colors don’t map to "more" or "less").

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#dataviz 📊 #color 🎨
Hues taken randomly from a rainbow color scheme show no intuitive order which renders the RC very impractical for tasks that require associating order to quantitative values.
January 6, 2026 at 12:59 AM
rsimmon.bsky.social
Eight ways of smoothing/interpolating irregular data, and not one of them is a heat map. From Cartography by @kennethfield.bsky.social

Here’s Ken’s discussion of heat maps, which are a type of statistical display: cartonerd.blogspot.com/2015/02/when...
3 by 3 grid of maps showing alternate ways to show the irregularly spaced data points displayed in the upper right.
January 5, 2026 at 10:15 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
I particularly like this one — not only for the jaunty uniforms, but also because it shows a distribution, not just an average, for each category.

#dataviz 📊
Chart showing academic achievement of children in late 18th Century Holland who don’t drink at all (good performance), drink a little (medium performance), and drink a lot (poor performance). Rather than showing an average, each group is shown as a distribution, each with individual portraits of jauntily-clad male students.
January 5, 2026 at 5:44 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
Fun dumbbell charts by @today.yougov.com via @pbump.com

#dataviz 📊
Pair of dumbbell charts showing sets of uncommon words more likely to be known by men (top) or women (lower). Men are more likely to be familiar with military and electronics terms, women with vocabulary related to fabric and clothing.
December 29, 2025 at 9:16 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
Baby landslide above Lake Chabot. I wonder if it’s just from the rain, or triggered by an #earthquake.
Rocks spilled across a wet asphalt path.
December 20, 2025 at 7:43 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
Tule fog, Sutter Buttes, California. Captured by Sentinel-2C on December 14, 2025.

🛰️🖼️
Satellite image showing the peaks of the Sutter Buttes peaking out of the Tule Fog shrouding the Central Valley. Only the highest elevations are visible, surrounded by miles of textured white low-level clouds.
December 18, 2025 at 4:25 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
I *just* noticed this detail in Cartography by @kennethfield.bsky.social & I literally LOLed (there may even be a few tears of laughter on my cheek right now). What a delightful easter egg.
Photo of a thumb printed on the edge of a page in the book Cartography in the entry for animation. It’s a subtle indicator that the book is a flipbook (or kineograph), and there’s an animation of a spinning globe included in the page margins.
December 15, 2025 at 5:22 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
Brilliant choice of bivariate color palette in this map of water stress from @wriclimate.bsky.social & ESRI.

I love how it draws attention to areas with high demand for water with saturated colors, & distinguishes low & high availability with a striking change in hue.

via @dantoearth.bsky.social
Map of water availability and water stress in South America. The map uses a bivariate color palette with dark blue indicating high water availability and demand, light blue/cyan indicating high water availability and low demand, gray showing low water availability and demand, and orange indicating low water availability with high water demand. Most of the Amazon is low water stress. Atlantic Brazil, the west coast bordering the Andes, and the pampas region have the most water stress. Map of water availability and water demand in North America. The map uses a bivariate color palette with dark blue indicating high water availability and demand, light blue/cyan indicating high water availability and low demand, gray showing low water availability and demand, and orange indicating low water availability with high water demand. Most of the Amazon is low water stress. Mexico and the U.S. northern plains and southwest have the most water stress. The Pacific Northwest, Great Lakes region, and northeast/Atlantic regions have high demand and availability. Alaska and northern Canada have high availability and low demand, except for the Alaskan North slope with lower availability and higher demand.
December 15, 2025 at 4:16 PM
rsimmon.bsky.social
Dark mode maps are attractive & engaging, but present design difficulties. It’s harder for us to parse light on dark than dark on light, and the way we interpret variation in lightness as differences in transparency compounds the difficulty.

📊🗺️🎨

From: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...
Dark mode map of flood risk in the Santa Monica Mountains. With a color palette that runs from dark blue to magenta it’s hard to spot any areas of risk. Dark mode map of flood risk in the Santa Monica Mountains. With a color palette that runs from brown to yellow it’s easier to spot areas of risk than the previous map, but still harder to parse than dark marks on light background would be.
December 9, 2025 at 5:18 PM