Making nice maps for posters with Python 🗺️+🐍
Contents
Making nice maps for posters with Python 🗺️+🐍¶
To communicate your results effectively to people 🧑🤝🧑, you may come to a point where making maps are needed.
These maps could be created for a conference poster, a presentation, or even for a social media 🐦 post!
In this tutorial 🧑🏫, we’ll focus on making basic 2D maps, and by the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
Set up basic map elements - basemap, overview map, title and axis annotations 🌐
Plot raster data (images/grids) and choose a Scientific Colour Map 🌈
Plot vector data (points/lines/polygons) with different styles 🗠
Save and export your map into a suitable format for your audience 😎
🎉 Getting started¶
Once you have an idea for what to map, you will need a way to draw it 🖌️.
There are plenty of ways to make maps 🗾, from pen and paper to Photoshop.
We’ll start by loading some of these tools, that help us to process and visualize our data 📊.
import icepyx as ipx # for downloading and loading ICESat-2 data
import pygmt # for making geographical maps and figures
import rioxarray # for performing geospatial operations like reprojection
import xarray as xr # for working with n-dimensional data