Sharing contour plot attributes between subplots

Question

I'm plotting several contour plots side by side for visualizing the time evolution of certain function. I want each contour's value and color to be shared between all subplots, but each time I add a new subplot, the contour values are recomputed (as shown in the image below), so any comparison between them is meaningless.

Contour plots with colorbars http://www.inf.utfsm.cl/~rbonvall/colorbar-and-contour-plots.png

I've tried setting manually different combinations of cmap, colorbar and axes attributes on each subplot instance, without success. How can I share the contour plot attributes between all the subplots? In other words, how to get the same colorbar for all subplots?

Answer 1

You can directly specify the contour values to be used in the contour plot. Here's an example:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x = np.arange(-1.2, 1.2, .025)
y = np.arange(-1.2, 1.2, .025)
X, Y = np.meshgrid(x, y)
Z = np.cos(X)*np.cos(Y)
Z = Z*Z

plt.subplot(1,2,1)
CS = plt.contour(X, Y, Z)   # set levels automatically
plt.clabel(CS, inline=1, fontsize=10)
plt.subplot(1,2,2)
CS = plt.contour(X, Y, Z-.1, CS.levels)  # set levels as previous levels
plt.clabel(CS, inline=1, fontsize=10)
plt.show()