Basemap Geographic Plotting with Matplotlib

In this Matplotlib tutorial, we're going to be covering the geographic plotting module, Basemap. Basemap is an extension to Matplotlib.

In order to use Basemap, we first need it. To get Basemap, you can either get it from here: http://matplotlib.org/basemap/users/download.html, or you can go to http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/.

If you are having trouble installing Basemap, check out the pip installation tutorial.

Once you have Basemap installed, you're ready to create maps. First, let's just project a simple map. To do this, we need to import Basemap, pyplot, create the projection, draw at least some sort of outline or data, then we can show the graph.

from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

m = Basemap(projection='mill')
m.drawcoastlines()
plt.show()

The above code should give you something like:

This is done using a Miller projection, which is just one of many Basemap Projection Options.

The next tutorial: Basemap Customization with Matplotlib