@AbyssalMonkey—
Unfortunately, it is easy to find English-language directives painted on roadways that are intended to be read bottom-to-top.
Numbers are generally said to “rise”, “climb”, or “ascend” as they increase, though various sorts of visual information is numbered such that numbers increase as the information descends. To insist that the thermometer or the various graphs that we encounter in the news stick to the same convention because the numbers “ascend” as we move from bottom to top is to lose sight of what is actually ascending.
I confront dial-controls such that the numbers increase from bottom-to-top, and other dial controls such that the numbers increase from top-to-bottom.
I have no problem with the thought that some convention is more familiar to readers. But the convention is not a consequence of logic, not built into a language that does not have arrowheads, and not universal within those cultures that happen to be Anglophonic.