Rendering Icelandic topography.
Initially, I wanted to try my hand at creating a topographic map of Ontario. But I quickly realized how flat this great province is.
Undiscouraged, my mind went to mapping Iceland, which I visited in 2015. They had hills there.
The NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has made available a topographic dataset, called the SRTM30_PLUS. I used this to obtain elevation data for Iceland, as a .csv file:
https://coastwatch.pfeg.noaa.gov/erddap/griddap/srtm30plus.html
After this came treating the data with numpy and Scipy and getting it ready for a scatter plot.
My initial attempts didn't er - look so good:
The solution was one line of code. A recently added class in Matplotlib.colors called "TwoSlopeNorm".
This allowed me to normalize the elevation data and set a center.
My code, with that particular line highlighted:
And here, the final image, with axes as coordinates:
