Advanced quiver and quiverkey functions

Demonstrates some more advanced options for quiver. For a simple example refer to Quiver Simple Demo.

Note: The plot autoscaling does not take into account the arrows, so those on the boundaries may reach out of the picture. This is not an easy problem to solve in a perfectly general way. The recommended workaround is to manually set the Axes limits in such a case.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

X, Y = np.meshgrid(np.arange(0, 2 * np.pi, .2), np.arange(0, 2 * np.pi, .2))
U = np.cos(X)
V = np.sin(Y)

fig1, ax1 = plt.subplots()
ax1.set_title('Arrows scale with plot width, not view')
Q = ax1.quiver(X, Y, U, V, units='width')
qk = ax1.quiverkey(Q, 0.9, 0.9, 2, r'$2 \frac{m}{s}$', labelpos='E',
                   coordinates='figure')

fig2, ax2 = plt.subplots()
ax2.set_title("pivot='mid'; every third arrow; units='inches'")
Q = ax2.quiver(X[::3, ::3], Y[::3, ::3], U[::3, ::3], V[::3, ::3],
               pivot='mid', units='inches')
qk = ax2.quiverkey(Q, 0.9, 0.9, 1, r'$1 \frac{m}{s}$', labelpos='E',
                   coordinates='figure')
ax2.scatter(X[::3, ::3], Y[::3, ::3], color='r', s=5)

Out:

<matplotlib.collections.PathCollection object at 0x7f73b7ce0ca0>

fig3, ax3 = plt.subplots()
ax3.set_title("pivot='tip'; scales with x view")
M = np.hypot(U, V)
Q = ax3.quiver(X, Y, U, V, M, units='x', pivot='tip', width=0.022,
               scale=1 / 0.15)
qk = ax3.quiverkey(Q, 0.9, 0.9, 1, r'$1 \frac{m}{s}$', labelpos='E',
                   coordinates='figure')
ax3.scatter(X, Y, color='0.5', s=1)

plt.show()

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References

The use of the following functions and methods is shown in this example:

import matplotlib
matplotlib.axes.Axes.quiver
matplotlib.pyplot.quiver
matplotlib.axes.Axes.quiverkey
matplotlib.pyplot.quiverkey

Out:

<function quiverkey at 0x7f73be829160>