Hatch area using pcolormesh in Basemap

Question

I try to hatch only the regions where I have statistically significant results. How can I do this using Basemap and pcolormesh?

plt.figure(figsize=(12,12))

lons = iris_cube.coord('longitude').points
lats = iris_cube.coord('latitude').points

m = Basemap(llcrnrlon=lons[0], llcrnrlat=lats[0], urcrnrlon=lons[-1], urcrnrlat=lats[-1], resolution='l')

lon, lat = np.meshgrid(lons, lats)

plt.subplot(111)

cs = m.pcolormesh(lon, lat, significant_data, cmap=cmap, norm=norm, hatch='/')

Answer 1

It seems pcolormesh does not support hatching (see https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/3058). Instead, the advice is to use pcolor, which starting from this example would look like,

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

dx, dy = 0.15, 0.05
y, x = np.mgrid[slice(-3, 3 + dy, dy),
                slice(-3, 3 + dx, dx)]
z = (1 - x / 2. + x ** 5 + y ** 3) * np.exp(-x ** 2 - y ** 2)
z = z[:-1, :-1]
zm = np.ma.masked_less(z, 0.3)

cm = plt.pcolormesh(x, y, z)
plt.pcolor(x, y, zm, hatch='/', alpha=0.)
plt.colorbar(cm)
plt.show()

where a mask array is used to get the values of z greater than 0.3 and these are hatched using pcolor.

To avoid plotting another colour over the top (so you get only hatching) I've set alpha to 0. in pcolor which feels a bit like a hack. The alternative is to use patch and assign to the areas you want. See this example Python: Leave Numpy NaN values from matplotlib heatmap and its legend. This may be more tricky for basemaps, etc than just choosing areas with pcolor.