Creating a map with cartopy

There is a multitude of libraries based on Matplotlib dedicated to the creation of specialized graphs. In this recipe, we will discuss cartopy, which is a Python package for creating maps and handling the display of geographical information.

Getting ready

The first step is to install cartopy on your system. Since cartopy assumes a large number of dependencies, this recipe assumes that you have the Anaconda distribution installed. This being the case, simply run the following statement from the command line to install cartopy:

conda install -c conda-forge cartopy

After the installation finishes, start Jupyter and run the following three commands in an execution cell:

%matplotlib inline
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

How to do it…

Enter the following in a Jupyter code cell and run it:

import cartopy.crs as ccrs
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(10,10))
ax = fig.add_subplot(1, 1, 1, 
     projection=ccrs.Mollweide())
ax.coastlines()
ax.stock_img()
rj_lat, rj_lon...