"The project is a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh (EPCC), the University of Leeds (School of Earth and Environment), the Software Sustainability Institute, the UK Met Office and North Carolina State University.
The colour palette was created in collaboration with artist Ethan Brain who analysed colour themes from two hundred images collected from a google image search for “air pollution”. As one might intuitively expect, polluted images are dominated by reds, browns and greys and clean images by blues.
To create the polluted palette from the images the images were analysed to identify the dominant colour themes then, to hone in on images that best represented air pollution, the initial image set was filtered to only include results that fit within the value range of the dominant colour theme. Dominant colour themes were then extracted from this filtered set and the resulting colours were hand-selected and then tweaked to create a palette that represents increasing values."
https://airqualitystripes.info/
