County boundaries for mid-west (or all of USA)

Development matplotlib-devel
1

Hello,

Sorry, its me again! I am not sure where else to ask this, so please
bear with me.

Does anyone know of a tutorial or source on how I could get county
boundaries ready to be plotted on my basemap output? I have
"drawstates" working wonderfully, and need something like
"drawcounties"

Thanks in advance!

~ Jeremy

2

Jeremy,

If you have access to the shapefile for county boundaries, you can call basemap’s readshapefile() function to draw the counties. You can specify line properties just like you would for a call to plotting the state boundaries.

As a matter of fact, drawstates() is, essentially, a call to readshapefile(), but it refers to a file that came packaged with basemap for convenience.

I hope that helps,
Ben Root

···

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Jeremy Lounds <lounds@…149…> wrote:

Hello,

Sorry, its me again! I am not sure where else to ask this, so please

bear with me.

Does anyone know of a tutorial or source on how I could get county

boundaries ready to be plotted on my basemap output? I have

“drawstates” working wonderfully, and need something like

“drawcounties”

Thanks in advance!

~ Jeremy

3

Thanks, I was able to find the files I needed from here:

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/co2000.html#shp

~ Jeremy

···

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 6:13 PM, Benjamin Root <ben.root@...553...> wrote:

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Jeremy Lounds <lounds@...149...> wrote:

Hello,

Sorry, its me again! I am not sure where else to ask this, so please
bear with me.

Does anyone know of a tutorial or source on how I could get county
boundaries ready to be plotted on my basemap output? I have
"drawstates" working wonderfully, and need something like
"drawcounties"

Thanks in advance!

~ Jeremy

Jeremy,

If you have access to the shapefile for county boundaries, you can call
basemap's readshapefile() function to draw the counties. You can specify
line properties just like you would for a call to plotting the state
boundaries.

As a matter of fact, drawstates() is, essentially, a call to
readshapefile(), but it refers to a file that came packaged with basemap for
convenience.

I hope that helps,
Ben Root