Bivariate mapping integrated to plotting

After the first month, I started to integrate bivariate mapping to matplotlib’s plotting functions like imshow, pcolor, pcolormesh, pcolorfast and scatter. The main challenge was modifying matplotlib’s current mechanism which assumes 2d arrays are to be mapped with colormap and 3d array having shape that of RGB and RGBA arrays are to be plotted as is. So after some discussion with mentors we decided instead of changing matplotlib’s current code in several places like _image.resample it will be much easier if we tackle this problem on our side by changing our current approach which maintains the two dimensions of bivariate data.

My mentor Hannah then came up with an idea to map bivariate data to some univariate and then mapping it to 2d colormap by flattening the 2d colormap to 1d look up table. This way by just modifying the incoming data we can get around the hassle of modifying the matplotlib’s code in a lot of places.

So finally I modified the before mentioned plotting functions as planned and then plotted some temperature and pressure data with some made-up bivariate colormap which is nowhere near good but serves the purpose.

In the coming weeks, there will be more work on the bivariate colormap. But next on my todo list is the 2d colorbar or color square.