This tutorial introduces the concept of mapping with Python. Mapping information is an important task in many fields, like in most of the geosciences, from geology (down there) to atmosphere (up there), in human or social sciences, in risk prevention, etc...

We will present the basics of mapping, starting from the scary term 'projection' and ending by producing high quality maps using state of the art Python code.

Two packages will be presented, Basemap and Cartopy. Their goal is the same, bringing cartographic power to your python scripts. Their way of accomplishing is a little different, and we will attempt to highlight the pros and cons of both packages.

Required for the tutorial: Basemap : http://matplotlib.org/basemap/ Cartopy : https://github.com/SciTools/cartopy