Following are a series of examples that illustrate how to use Basemap instance methods to plot your data on a map. More examples are included in the doc/examples directory of the basemap source distribution. There are a number of Basemap instance methods for plotting data:

• :func:`~mpl_toolkits.basemap.Basemap.contour`: draw contour lines.
• :func:`~mpl_toolkits.basemap.Basemap.contourf`: draw filled contours.
• :func:`~mpl_toolkits.basemap.Basemap.imshow`: draw an image.
• :func:`~mpl_toolkits.basemap.Basemap.pcolor`: draw a pseudocolor plot.
• :func:`~mpl_toolkits.basemap.Basemap.pcolormesh`: draw a pseudocolor plot (faster version for regular meshes).
• :func:`~mpl_toolkits.basemap.Basemap.plot`: draw lines and/or markers.
• :func:`~mpl_toolkits.basemap.Basemap.scatter`: draw points with markers.
• :func:`~mpl_toolkits.basemap.Basemap.quiver`: draw vectors.
• :func:`~mpl_toolkits.basemap.Basemap.barbs`: draw wind barbs.
• :func:`~mpl_toolkits.basemap.Basemap.drawgreatcircle`: draw a great circle.

Many of these instances methods simply forward to the corresponding matplotlib Axes instance method, with some extra pre/post processing and argument checking. You can also plot on the map directly with the matplotlib pyplot interface, or the OO api, using the Axes instance associated with the Basemap.

For more specifics of how to use the Basemap instance methods, see :ref:`api-index`.

Here are the examples (many of which utilize the netcdf4-python module to retrieve datasets over http):

• Plot contour lines on a basemap

.. plot:: users/figures/contour1.py

• Plot precip with filled contours

.. plot:: users/figures/plotprecip.py

• Plot sea-level pressure weather map with labelled highs and lows

.. plot:: users/figures/plothighsandlows.py

• Plot hurricane tracks from a shapefile

.. plot:: users/figures/hurrtracks.py

• Plot etopo5 topography/bathymetry data as an image (with and without shading from a specified light source).

.. plot:: users/figures/plotetopo5.py

• Plot markers at locations of ARGO floats.

.. plot:: users/figures/plotargo.py

• Pseudo-color plot of SST and sea ice analysis.

.. plot:: users/figures/plotsst.py

• Plotting wind vectors and wind barbs.

.. plot:: users/figures/plotwindvec.py

• Draw great circle between NY and London.

.. plot:: users/figures/plotgreatcircle.py

• Draw day-night terminator on a map.

.. plot:: users/figures/plotdaynight.py