Data Visualization - how to display error of a color scale?

Question

I've been turning this around in my head and I think the answer is to ultimately tabulate the data, but it's an interesting question so I'll still post it.
I have three sets of data of equal length. Two of these sets, call them X and Y, are plotted against each other on a scatter plot. The third set, C, is overlaid on the scatter plot as a color map. All three of these sets have a standard deviation associated with each point.
It's easy enough to denote the standard deviation as error bars on the scatter plot points. But how does one typically denote the standard deviations on the color map?

Nuclear03020704 · Answer

When dealing with colors, it's a bit tricky to denote the error bars/uncertainty.
One way it can be done is to plot two scatterplots. One with color denoting the lower limit of the error bar, and the other with color denoting the upper error bar.

Another way to do it is to plot two scatterplots. First scatterplot uses value in C to denote their points' color, and the second scatterplot uses the error/standard deviation value to denote their points' color.

Either way, it will be still difficult for humans to mentally process error or uncertainty in terms of color, so I'd advise to seek another approach.

Data Visualization - how to display error of a color scale?

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