Plotting the temperature distribution on a sphere with python

Question

I have the following problem:

a have N points on a sphere specified by a array x, with x.shape=(N,3). This array contains their cartesian coordinates. Furthermore, a

Answer 1

One way to do this is to set facecolors by mapping your heat data through the colormap.

Here's an example:

from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from matplotlib import cm

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection='3d')

u = np.linspace(0, 2 * np.pi, 80)
v = np.linspace(0, np.pi, 80)

# create the sphere surface
x=10 * np.outer(np.cos(u), np.sin(v))
y=10 * np.outer(np.sin(u), np.sin(v))
z=10 * np.outer(np.ones(np.size(u)), np.cos(v))

# simulate heat pattern (striped)
myheatmap = np.abs(np.sin(y))

ax.plot_surface(x, y, z, cstride=1, rstride=1, facecolors=cm.hot(myheatmap))

plt.show()

Here, my "heatmap" is just stripes along the y-axis, which I made using the function np.abs(np.sin(y)), but anything that goes form 0 to 1 will work (and, of course, it needs to match the shapes on x, etc.