Alternative Geographical Display Strategies for Bivariate Relationships

摘要

The complexity of regional water management problems necessitates the summarization of water resource data in a form that is easily analyzed visually. Computer generated maps are well suited for displaying complex relationships since they are easy to create and modify and are relatively inexpensive compared to traditional techniques. Development of new display techniques creates questions about the most effective display of data used for generic assessments. Recent attempts at displaying bivariate data geographically have not been entirely successful due to numerous data categories and complex color patterns used in cross mapping techniques. This paper offers an alternate method of displaying bivariate data which uses the degree of differences between two variables (e.g., water supply and water demand) to create a scale in which shades of two primary colors are used for positive and negative differences while a third color is used for the null case (i.e., within the confidence limits of the statistical model.). (ERA citation 06:017428)