Change colorbar limits without changing the values of the data it represents in scatter-CodePudding

I'm trying to change a colorbar attached to a scatter plot so that the minimum and maximum of the colorbar are the minimum and maximum of the data, but I want the data to be centred at zero as I'm using a colormap with white at zero. Here is my example

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x = np.linspace(0, 1, 61)
y = np.linspace(0, 1, 61)
C = np.linspace(-10, 50, 61)
M = np.abs(C).max() # used for vmin and vmax

fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 1, figsize=(5,3), dpi=150)
sc=ax.scatter(x, y, c=C, marker='o', edgecolor='k', vmin=-M, vmax=M, cmap=plt.cm.RdBu_r)
cbar=fig.colorbar(sc, ax=ax, label='$R - R_0$ (mm)')
ax.set_xlabel('x')
ax.set_ylabel('y')

As you can see from the attached figure, the colorbar goes down to -M, where as I want the bar to just go down to -10, but if I let vmin=-10 then the colorbar won't be zerod at white. Normally, setting vmin to /- M when using contourf the colorbar automatically sorts to how I want. This sort of behaviour is what I expect when contourf uses levels=np.linspace(-M,M,61) rather than setting it with vmin and vmax with levels=62. An example showing the default contourf colorbar behaviour I want in my scatter example is shown below

plt.figure(figsize=(6,5), dpi=150)
plt.contourf(x, x, np.reshape(np.linspace(-10, 50, 61*61), (61,61)),
                   levels=62, vmin=-M, vmax=M, cmap=plt.cm.RdBu_r)
plt.colorbar(label='$R - R_0$ (mm)')

Does anyone have any thoughts? I found

CodePudding user response：

Another approach until v3.5 is released is to make a custom colormap that does what you want (see also