On the surface, this was a pretty easy week in Cartographic Skills, but I'm continuing to struggle with some of the finer points of using Adobe Illustrator, and this week's map is not my best. So it goes.
The topic of the week is isarithmic mapping, Isarithmic maps are used to map continuous data, such as temperature or topography. The data can be symbolized using graduated color, contour lines, or both. In the lab exercise for this week, we looked at a dataset for annual precipitation amounts across Washington state. Although the data was first mapped using continuous tone symbology, in which the data is unclassed and stretched over the full range of a color ramp, for the final map, pictured below, the data is mapped using hypsometric tints. It is divided into classes (we set the ranges manually) with a color assigned to each class. In this case, contour lines were also created that fall at the divisions between classes, to make it easier to distinguish them when reading the map.
This type of map, which illustrates the yearly average precipitation over a 30-year time span, is typically used to study long-term climatic trends. This particular dataset was created using the PRISM system, which relate data collected at weather monitoring stations to elevation and other variables in order to interpolate the data with respect to known weather patterns as well as location. The blurb on the map explains PRISM in a bit more detail.
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