matplotlib colorbar in each subplot

Question

I would like to add a separate colorbar to each subplot in a 2x2 plot.

fig , ( (ax1,ax2) , (ax3,ax4)) = plt.subplots(2, 2,sharex = True,sharey=True)
z1_plot = ax1.scatter(x,y,c = z1,vmin=0.0,vmax=0.4)
plt.colorbar(z1_plot,cax=ax1)
z2_plot = ax2.scatter(x,y,c = z2,vmin=0.0,vmax=40)
plt.colorbar(z1_plot,cax=ax2)
z3_plot = ax3.scatter(x,y,c = z3,vmin=0.0,vmax=894)
plt.colorbar(z1_plot,cax=ax3)
z4_plot = ax4.scatter(x,y,c = z4,vmin=0.0,vmax=234324)
plt.colorbar(z1_plot,cax=ax4)
plt.show()

I thought that this is how you do it, but the resulting plot is really messed up; it just has an all grey background and ignores the set_xlim , set_ylim commands I have (not shown here for simplicity). + it shows no color bars. Is this the right way to do it?

I also tried getting rid of the "cax = ...", but then the colorbar all goes on the bottom right plot and not to each separate plot!

Answer 1

This can be easily solved with the the utility make_axes_locatable. I provide a minimal example that shows how this works and should be readily adaptable:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1 import make_axes_locatable

import numpy as np

m1 = np.random.rand(3, 3)
m2 = np.arange(0, 3*3, 1).reshape((3, 3))

fig = plt.figure(figsize=(16, 12))
ax1 = fig.add_subplot(121)
im1 = ax1.imshow(m1, interpolation='None')

divider = make_axes_locatable(ax1)
cax = divider.append_axes('right', size='5%', pad=0.05)
fig.colorbar(im1, cax=cax, orientation='vertical')

ax2 = fig.add_subplot(122)
im2 = ax2.imshow(m2, interpolation='None')

divider = make_axes_locatable(ax2)
cax = divider.append_axes('right', size='5%', pad=0.05)
fig.colorbar(im2, cax=cax, orientation='vertical');