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pythonmatplotlibcontour
IniMzungu
IniMzungu

Reputation: 97

Matplotlib: Plotting of 3D data on a Cartesian coordinate system, with 1D Arrays (Python)

Good Afternoon All,

I'm attempting to create a contour map of surface elevation by using drilling data from a mineral exploration programme. I am new to programming, any feedback would be welcomed!

Each drill hole has a:

  1. hole id
  2. x co-ordinate (Easting)
  3. y co-ordinate (Northing)
  4. z value (surface elevation).

An excerpt of the data is as follows:

Sample Drilling Data

Methodology

I broke the work down into two steps.

1) Checking that the data plots in the correct area

I used pandas to extract the co-ordinates of each drilling hole from the csv file, and plotted the data using plt.scatter from matplotlib.

This is my output. So far it works, so now I want to plot the 3D (z axis) data.

Plotting of drill holes

2) Plotting of Surface_Elevation (z axis)

This is where I am having problems. I've read through several contouring guides for matplotlib which is dependent on plt.contour. The issue is that this function wants a 2D array, and the data that I want to contour is 1D. Am I missing something here?

My attempt

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt  # plot data
import pandas as pd  # extract data from csv

# access csv and assign as a variable
dataset = pd.read_csv('spreadsheet.csv')

# x_axis values extracted and converted to a list from the csv
x_axis = list(dataset["Orig_East"])

# y_axis values extracted and converted to a list from the csv
y_axis = list(dataset["Orig_North"])

# z_axis values extracted and converted to a list from the csv
z_axis = list(dataset["Surface_Elevation"])


plt.contour(x_axis, y_axis, z_axis, colors='black');
plt.ticklabel_format(useOffset=False, style='plain')  # remove exponential axis labels
plt.xlabel('Easting')  # label x axis
plt.ylabel('Northing')  # label y axis
plt.title('Surface Elevation') # label plot

# plot graph
plt.show()

Upvotes: 0

Views: 397

Answers (1)

Timo
Timo

Reputation: 493

A possible solution is to encode the elevation of each point into the color of the scatter marker. This can be done by calling plt.scatter(x, y, c=z) you can also specify a desired cmap, see the documentation.

Upvotes: 1

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