Change colours of particular bars in a bar chart

Question

I\'ve been creating some bar-charts and I was wondering is it possible to colour bars on a chart depending on whether they lie above or below the x-axis?

For clarifi

Answer 1

One way is to index a vector of colours with a logical or factor variable (this is a common idiom in R.

set.seed(1)
NAO <- rnorm(40)
cols <- c("red","black")
pos <- NAO >= 0
barplot(NAO, col = cols[pos + 1], border = cols[pos + 1])

The trick here is pos:

> pos
 [1] FALSE  TRUE FALSE  TRUE  TRUE FALSE  TRUE  TRUE  TRUE FALSE
[11]  TRUE  TRUE FALSE FALSE  TRUE FALSE FALSE  TRUE  TRUE  TRUE
[21]  TRUE  TRUE  TRUE FALSE  TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE  TRUE
[31]  TRUE FALSE  TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE  TRUE  TRUE

which we coerce to numeric in the barplot() call:

> pos + 1
 [1] 1 2 1 2 2 1 2 2 2 1 2 2 1 1 2 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 1 1 1 1 2
[31] 2 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 2 2

The vector of 1s and 2s selects elements from the vector of colour cols, such that:

> cols[pos + 1]
 [1] "red"   "black" "red"   "black" "black" "red"   "black"
 [8] "black" "black" "red"   "black" "black" "red"   "red"  
[15] "black" "red"   "red"   "black" "black" "black" "black"
[22] "black" "black" "red"   "black" "red"   "red"   "red"  
[29] "red"   "black" "black" "red"   "black" "red"   "red"  
[36] "red"   "red"   "red"   "black" "black"

which is the colour passed on to each bar drawn.

In the code above I also set the border of the bars to the relevant colour, via argument border.

The resulting plot should look like this