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Does anyone know of a Python tool for creating plots using cylindrical coordinates, either with Matplotlib or some other package?

An example:

enter image description here

Image credit: http://www.trb.org/Main/Blurbs/170608.aspx

andrew
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  • You could use gnuplot to make a radial plot combined with a heatmap. The radial element would represent times of day from your example figure, while colors in the heatmap element would represent the height of the "wires" in your 3D plot. One clear advantage is that the audience reading the plot will be able to see the data in quantitative form, and not have to guess at the height of the wires, with potential interpretation error from parallax effect. http://stackoverflow.com/a/18794065/19410 – Alex Reynolds Jun 22 '15 at 18:33

2 Answers2

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I believe you can use the basemap toolkit to do cylindrical projections.

Here is the link to the basemap toolkit page

The desired projection is set with the projection keyword. Default is cyl. There are several other supported projections as well that you may be interested in.

Srivatsan
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    Basemap provides a geographic cylindrical projection. I don't see how I can use a geographic cylindrical projection for plotting in a cylindrical coordinate system. – andrew Jun 18 '15 at 16:47
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To somewhat answer my own question, there does not appear to be a Python package that can make this plot out of the box.

I contacted the authors of the report and have learned that the original plot was created using Processing.

andrew
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