How to display a colorbar for a Basemap

Question

I have a shapefile and a series like this:

UF
Acre                     261
Alagoas                  657
Amazonas                 793
Amapá                    162
Bahia                   1867
Ceará                   5657
Distrito Federal         430
Espírito Santo          1734
Goiás                   4110
Maranhão                1421
Minas Gerais           11812
Mato Grosso do Sul      1006
Mato Grosso             1391
Pará                    1889
Paraíba                 1575
Pernambuco              4019
Piauí                   1665
Paraná                  3745
Rio de Janeiro          1613
Rio Grande do Norte     1998
Rondônia                3102
Roraima                  237
Rio Grande do Sul       5643
Santa Catarina          5372
Sergipe                  413
São Paulo               8237
Tocantins                771
Name: 0, dtype: int64

Where UF is the state name as presented in the shapefile and the series values are the values that I want to use to generate colors to fill a basemap. This is what I got so far:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.patches import Polygon
from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap
import matplotlib.cm as cm
import matplotlib as mpl
from matplotlib.collections import PatchCollection


def make_map(ax):
    m = Basemap(projection='merc', llcrnrlat=-35, urcrnrlat=7,
                llcrnrlon=-77, urcrnrlon=-32, resolution='i', ax=ax)
    m.fillcontinents()
    return m

def drawstates(fig, ax, data, shapefile='../BRA_adm_shp/BRA_adm1'):
    shp = m.readshapefile(shapefile, 'states', drawbounds=False)

    norm = mpl.colors.Normalize(vmin=data.min(), vmax=data.max())
    cmap = cm.hot
    sm = cm.ScalarMappable(norm=norm, cmap=cmap)
    colors = []
    patches = []

    for nshape, seg in enumerate(m.states):
        uf = m.states_info[nshape]['NAME_1']
        color  = sm.to_rgba(data[uf])
        poly = Polygon(seg, facecolor=color, edgecolor='white')
        ax.add_patch(poly)
        patches.append(poly)
        colors.append(color)

    p = PatchCollection(patches, cmap=cmap)
    p.set_array(np.array(colors))
    cb = fig.colorbar(p, ax=ax, orientation='horizontal')

fig, axes = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize=(20, 10))
m = make_map(axes[0])
drawstates(fig, m.ax, m1)

Which leads to:

I'm not sure if this is the correct way of doing it, but I wonder how to preserve the scale of the input values, i.e., of not scaling the colorbar between 0 and 1, and how to prevent this big distance between the map and its colorbar.

Answer 1

The polygons are colorized according to the ScalaMappable sm. Hence this ScalarMappable is the one you want to give as argument to the colormap

sm = cm.ScalarMappable(norm=norm, cmap=cmap)
sm.set_array([]) # can be an empty list, only needed for matplotlib < 3.1
# ...
cb = fig.colorbar(sm, ax=ax, orientation='horizontal')

The padding between axes and colorbar can be set with the pad argument. The default should be pad=0.15 and you will need to find a good value yourself.