CartoPy Guide

Cartopy is a new map plotting tool/package for python3.X and has replaced the basemap package.

Installation

Conda

conda env create -f environment.yml

conda activate cartopy

Add to notebook:

conda install -c anaconda ipykernel
python -m ipykernel install --user --name=cartopy

See for more information here: https://scitools.org.uk/cartopy/docs/latest/installing.html#installing

Requirements

Python 3.9 or higher

Required packages

• Matplotlib 3.4
• Shapely 1.7.1
• pyshp 2.1
• pyproj 3.1.0
• pytest 5.1.2 (needed for full testing)
• pytest-mpl 0.11

Shapes and shapereader

How to add a background to you plots like topography, boundaries of states or infrastructure are explained here: https://scitools.org.uk/cartopy/docs/v0.15/tutorials/using_the_shapereader.html

A short summary what you have to do:

1. Chose a shapefile of you desire here: https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/
2. Save the shapefile on any kind of hard disk.
3. Imoprt: import cartopy.io.shapereader as shpreader
4. Load the shapefile into your script and add it to you plot:

shapename = 'your_shape_file'
adm1_shapes = list(shpreader.Reader(shapename).geometries())
ax.add_geometries(adm1_shapes, crs.PlateCarree(), edgecolor='?',facecolor='?')

or

shapename = 'your_shape_file'
prob_shp = shpreader.natural_earth(resolution='110m', category='cultural', name=shapename)
ax.add_geometries(shpreader.Reader(prob_shp).geometries(),
        ccrs.PlateCarree())