Examples

Basic Usage

nc-time-axis works by adding converters to the flexible units registry of matplotlib. To register its converters, simply import nc_time_axis. Then you will be able to make plots with cftime.datetime axes.

In [1]: import cftime

In [2]: import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

In [3]: import nc_time_axis

In [4]: import numpy as np

In [5]: fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 1)

In [6]: x = np.linspace(0, 6 * np.pi)

In [7]: y = 0.5 * x + np.sin(x)

In [8]: times = cftime.num2date(x, units="days since 2000-01-01", calendar="noleap")

In [9]: ax.plot(times, y);

In [10]: fig.show()

Setting the Axes Ticks and Tick Format

In the first example, the ticks and tick label formats were chosen automatically using heuristics in nc-time-axis. If you would like to explicitly set the tick positions and label format you may do so using matplotlib.axes.Axes.set_xticks() and CFTimeFormatter. The CFTimeFormatter takes in a date format string (see the Python documentation for acceptable format codes) and the calendar type of the axis (see the cftime.datetime documentation for valid calendar strings).

In [11]: fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 1)

In [12]: ax.plot(times, y);

In [13]: ax.set_xticks([cftime.datetime(2000, 1, day, calendar="noleap") for day in range(2, 19, 4)]);

In [14]: formatter = nc_time_axis.CFTimeFormatter("%m-%d %H:%M", "noleap")

In [15]: ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(formatter)

In [16]: fig.show()