matplotlib

Andrew Straw wrote:
> I've been playing around with stereographic projections, and it appears
> that the bounding-box for the 'stere' projection isn't computed. Being
> blissfully unaware of all the complexities involved, I thought I'd send
> this email to see if there's an easy way to deal with the situation.
>
> Basically, I'm trying to plot on an equatorial stereographic projection
> created like so:
>
> m=Basemap(projection='stere', lat_ts = 0.0, lat_0 = 0, lon_0 = 90.0)
>
> This creates a projection that seems to work well, but the problem is
> that the [ll|ur]crn* attributes aren't set to anything useful, meaning
> that lots of the nice basemap goodies aren't working (drawmeridians, etc.)
>   
Andrew: The [ll|ur]crn* have default values which don't work very well 
for the stereographic projection (-90,+90,-180,+180).  You'll have to 
set them yourself when you create the Basemap instance.
> (Note: I don't really understand what the lat_ts is doing -- the
> docstring says it is the "natural origin". I can't find reference to
> this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereographic_projection . I guess
> this is related to the discussion of "scale error at the extremities"
> at 
> http://www.remotesensing.org/geotiff/proj_list/oblique_stereographic.html
> , and thus I assume that if lat_ts is set to lat_0, the scale factor
> will be 1 at the point of tangency. )
>   
AFAICT, lat_ts is the latitude of 'true scale', whatever that means. I 
set the docstring based upon the info at 
http://www.remotesensing.org/geotiff/proj_list/polar_stereographic.html. 
> So, the question is, can some default bounding box be computed for
> equatorial (and possibly oblique) stereographic projections in any
> reasonable way? It would be nice to make plots like those found on the
> wikipedia page.
>   

You should be able to make all those plots without too much difficulty - 
just some trial and error in choosing the corners of the plot region.  
If you are making a polar stereographic projection, you can use 
projection='npstere' or 'spstere' and set the bounding latitude (the 
latitude that is tangent to the plot boundary - see the polarmaps.py 
example) and Basemap will determine the corners for you automatically.  
I don't know of any obvious way to do this for the equatorial case - 
it's pretty hard to guess what the user might want.  I welcome any 
suggestions though.

-Jeff


-- 
Jeffrey S. Whitaker         Phone : (303)497-6313
NOAA/OAR/CDC  R/PSD1        FAX   : (303)497-6449
325 Broadway                Boulder, CO, USA 80305-3328

Jeff Whitaker wrote:
> You should be able to make all those plots without too much difficulty - 
> just some trial and error in choosing the corners of the plot region.  
> If you are making a polar stereographic projection, you can use 
> projection='npstere' or 'spstere' and set the bounding latitude (the 
> latitude that is tangent to the plot boundary - see the polarmaps.py 
> example) and Basemap will determine the corners for you automatically.  
> I don't know of any obvious way to do this for the equatorial case - 
> it's pretty hard to guess what the user might want.  I welcome any 
> suggestions though.
>
> -Jeff
>
>   
Dear Jeff,

Thanks for your quick reply.

I ended up setting my boundaries by simply using the projection to plot my points, letting matplotlib plot the x,y points (without basemap to set the axes limits), and then taking the limits automatically computed by matplotlib and passing them through the inverse projection to get the lon,lat coordinates of the box. Now, on my next pass through, I'm using these as the bounding box information.

As always, basemap is working very well.

Cheers!
Andrew