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, 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 0.9.0. You can find the source code for cartopy on our github page.
Installation of cartopy can currently only be done from source. Build instructions for specific operating systems can be found in the building from source section.
The cartopy documentation is arranged in a userguide form with reference documentation available inline.
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.
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.
- 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: ”.
