shaded colors over a gray filled continent

Dear NCL users,

I use NCL (version 6.0.0) to make a panel plot that shows precipitation (colors) and geopotential height contours at 1000 (solid lines) and 500 hPa (dashed lines). See attached plot1. This figure is very busy and it may be difficult for the reader to recognize the region with respect to the topography. One way to make this plot more clear might be to fill the continent or sea surface with a light gray color, but without dominating the precipitation. So far I have not seen an example on the NCL UCAR website that shows both shaded colors over a gray filled continent/sea. What would be the most easy solution for this?

I have one potential idea. Previously I made a similar plot (see attached plot 2) with missing values in gray shaded colors. For this I had to add in a complicated way a gray color to the color table. In a similar way I could add a gray color to the color table in plot1 for values from e.g. -2 to 0; and to change precipitation values of "0" over land or sea to e.g. -1. As such the land or sea surface without precipitation will be filled gray. However, I do not want the gray color to be included in the color table. How should I remove one color from the final color table without losing the color in the plot?

Thank you very much for any helpful suggestion!

Cheers
Andries

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