R:intermediate

It is very common to see relief maps with shadow effects, also known as ‘hillshade’, which generates visual depth. How can we create these effects in R and how to include them in ggplot2?

In April of this year, I made an animation of the 24-hour average temperature of January 2020, also showing the day-night cycle. My biggest problem was finding a way to project correctly the area at night without breaking the geometry. The easiest solution I found was rasterising the night polygon and then reprojecting it. Indeed, a vector approach could be used, but I have preferred to use raster data here.

When we visualize precipitation and temperature anomalies, we simply use time series as bar graph indicating negative and positive values in red and blue. However, in order to have a better overview we need both anomalies in a single graph. In this way we could more easly answer the question of whether a particular season or month was dry-warm or wet-cold, and even compare these anomalies in the context of previous years.