Exercise

We learned how to make 2D plots, and touched a little bit of cartopy and Basemap. (I prepared example jupyter notebooks for cartopy and Basemap.)

Based on these lessons, we will finalize python lectures with this exercise!

Plotting exercise

We will practice what we learned about plotting data on a 2D space.
First, let’s get the data.

import numpy as np
import numpy.ma as ma
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap
import cartopy.crs as ccrs
%matplotlib inline

data = np.load('exercisedata.npz')
LON = data['LON']
LAT = data['LAT']      
u10 = data['u10']      # zonal velocity at 10m (m/s)
v10 = data['v10']      # meridional velocity at 10m (m/s)
T2m = data['T2']       # temperature at 2m (K)
LH = data['LH']        # latent heat (W/m2)
Psfc = data['Psfc']    # surface pressure (Pa)
w = data['w']          # vertical velocity (m/s)
date = data['date']
mask = data['mask']    # land mask
mask = ma.masked_where(mask==1, mask)
mask += 1

1. Plot surface pressure

Using the imshow function

2. Plot temperature at 2m

Using the pcolormesh function

3. Plot latent heat

Using the contour function

4. Plot wind and its speed

4-1 Using arrows with colors

4-2 Using arrows with the same size on the background of wind speed

5. Find the hurricane track (using either cartopy or Basemap)

The solution can be found here