Kenneth Moreland
In a 2009 paper, Kenneth Moreland of Sandia National Laboratories describes a method to systematically generate attractive diverging colour-maps. His algorithm has been implemented in the Visualization Toolkit and we present here some maps produced with it, including the cool-warm scheme commended in Moreland’s paper as follows:
This paper recommends a good default color map for general purpose scientific visualization. The color map derived here is an all-around good performer: it works well for low and high frequency data, orders the data, is perceptually linear, behaves well for observers with color-deficient vision, and has reasonably low impact on the shading of three-dimensional surfaces.
For details, see , Diverging Color Maps for Scientific Visualization, Advances in Visual Computing, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5876 pp. 92–103 (2009). DOI