Basemap Resolution

I participated in NASA's Student Airborne Research Program during the summer of 2013. A total of 31 students, including myself, participated in the program. We worked on the DC-8 flying laboratory and flew about 4,600 miles all over California. With the data we collected on the plane, each student worked on an individual research project. I was determined to do all my data analysis using Python. One useful tool was the basemap library.

The basemap toolkit allows programmers to draw maps and plot information on the map. I quickly learned that maps can be drawn at various resolutions: crude (c), low (l), intermediate (i), high (h), and full (f). Maps with higher resolution take more computing power and take longer to draw. Below is a comparison of the quality of each map resolution showing Southern California.

On these maps I could add color, latitude and longitude lines, and finally plot data. Shown below is data from the Air Resources Labratory HYSPLIT model showing a 24-hour backward trajectories for Los Angeles on the days shown below. The star is downtown LA and the blue path shows the travel path of an air parcel in LA at the given date and time.