Question

I am new to matplotlib. When I generate a series of contourf plots with a loop, matplotlib creates n duplicated colorbars (the colorbar has a fixed range)

Must I destroy the old colorbar for each loop, if so how do I do that?

Update:

Ok, but if I generate a colorbar for a contourf plot. How do I make sure that the entire extent of the scale is included. I have tried using “clip=False” & extend=’both’

c_scale = matplotlib.colors.Normalize(vmin=0, vmax=1,clip=False)
cbar = plt.colorbar(cmap=plt.cm.jet,norm=c_scale,shrink=0.5,extend='both')

Answer 1

contourf does not generate a colorbar, colorbar does.

If the colorbar has a fixed range, you could call colorbar() once at the beginning and then merely plot your new contourf without calling colorbar()

An example:

#In which we make contourplots with just one colorbar

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

plt.figure(1)
plt.clf()
plt.contourf(np.random.random((10,10)))
plt.colorbar()
for k in xrange(10):
    plt.contourf(np.random.random((10,10)))
plt.show()