Introduction

Cartopy is a Python package designed to make drawing maps for data analysis and visualisation as easy as possible.

Cartopy makes use of the powerful PROJ.4, numpy and shapely libraries and has a simple and intuitive drawing interface to matplotlib for creating publication quality maps.

Some of the key features of cartopy are:

• object oriented projection definitions
• point, line, vector, polygon and image transformations between projections
• integration to expose advanced mapping in matplotlib with a simple and intuitive interface
• powerful vector data handling by integrating shapefile reading with Shapely capabilities

Cartopy is licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License and is at version 0.14.dev0. You can find the source code for cartopy on our github page.

Getting started

The installation guide provides information on getting up and running, and cartopy’s documentation is arranged userguide form with reference documentation available inline.

• Coordinate reference systems in Cartopy
• Cartopy projection list
• Using the cartopy shapereader
• Using cartopy with matplotlib
• The cartopy Feature interface
• Cartopy developer interfaces

The outline link found above the cartopy logo on all pages can be used to quickly find the reference documentation for known classes or functions.

For those updating from an older version of cartopy, the what’s new page outlines recent changes, new features, and future development plans.

Getting involved

Cartopy was originally developed at the UK Met Office to allow scientists to visualise their data on maps quickly, easily and most importantly, accurately. Cartopy has been made freely available under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. It is suitable to be used in a variety of scientific fields and has an active development community.

There are many ways to get involved in the development of cartopy:

• If you write a paper which makes use of cartopy, please consider citing it.
• If you publish the maps and plots, please consider the required attribution of copyright for the data.
• Report bugs to https://github.com/SciTools/cartopy/issues (please look to see if there are any outstanding bugs which cover the issue before making a new one).
• Help others with support questions on stackoverflow.
• Contribute to the documentation fixing typos, adding examples, explaining things more clearly, or even re-designing its layout/logos etc..
• Contribute bug fixes (a list of outstanding bugs can be found on github).
• Contribute enhancements and new features (a wish list of features can also be found on github).

Development discussion takes place on the matplotlib-devel mailing list with all discussion subjects prefixed with “cartopy: ”.