Colour groups derived from numerical classification of the munsell soil colour chips

Abstract

Judgments of soil colour differences rely almost entirely upon subjective assessments. This paper describes a more objective numerical technique for grouping the 350 possible colour chips on the 'Munsell Soil Color Charts' (235 actual chips and an additional 115 interjacent chips that correspond to integer steps of chroma for hues 5R to 5Y). A polythetic, divisive classification produced 10 internally consistent groups of colours that have been described and named. It is proposed that soil colours can be adequately described for many purposes simply by reference to these colour groups. The 10 groups have been used to define generalized soil colour names.