Exactly what I was thinking. There are 3 different off-white colors that indicate vastly different temperature variants. This map is incredibly ambiguous. Which white zones are -8° below average, roughly the same as average, or 13° above average?

I might be the only one who doesn’t mind the color scheme. For the temperature range on the map, the only colors that don’t fit into the typical blue-to-red gradient are the green for really cold, which makes the coldest anomalies really pop, and the white for really hot. I get the complaints about white being used for both normal average temperature and for extreme heat, but it’s easy to tell which is which by the neighboring colors, and it almost looks as if France got so hot that it got a third degree burn, which chars the flesh, nerves included, and no longer feels like anything - thus insensate white.

So MAYBE, and I'm pulling this out of my ass with no background here, but expectation is temperature doesn't jump, but flows as a gradient. Using France as the start, we've white fading to dark greys then reds, which is the hottest of the three white possibilities. As going hotter then that gets pink again, the top end is white in France. We then decrease down the scale until we get those. green pockets. Light green/white touching green would signify the lower of the three white temps. Not a great map, but perhaps it's an understood practice with the field. After all, how do you convert a quantitative scale into qualitative data. You can't really just number everything (people have shit attention spans and they'll gloss over immediately. Anybody who's delivered technical data to management can attest to that lol) Color works well for that, but has a limited useful spectrum. Getting too specific in a single spectrum muddies the graphic (what's the exact color over Lisbon here? This kinda salmony guy? So 8? Or closer to 9?)