Improve data layer rendering

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Having the background shine through helps to improve the visual quality of the data:

[pmast]

There is some more information by Philip Eales on what they are doing:

When preparing our land texturemaps, we apply terrain shading to the data colours. The Photoshop equivalent would be to place the shading layer above the data layer, using the soft light (or sometimes hard light) overlay mode, with its transparency controlling the strength of the shading. The terrain shading layer should have a “flat” value of 127, which will leave the data colours unmodified, and a shading variation of maybe 10% above and below that value. The shading layer can also include rivers and lakes, all of which helps with geographical orientation and to explain the patterns we see in the data. We also clip the low-resolution data at the coastline (as we do with the ocean ECVs).

We apply this to the land ECVs: LST, soil moisture, land cover type, land cover NDVI/OGVI, biomass, permafrost, ice sheets, glaciers, snow.

For the atmospheric ECVs, we take a different approach, since they are above the land surface, so less affected by it, using transparency across the data range, or the lower part of it.

Maybe, with you rebuilding your globe rendering, there is scope to include some of this to improve the appearance of the ECVs on the globe (and also in the 2D flat map)? ESA Comms do a similar thing when they are preparing images for release to the public (India LST attached, along with our 2D map).

[pmast]

Examples of their results: