Plotting in GWpy (gwpy.plotter)

Visualisation of the data produced by gravitational-wave detectors is obviously a key part of understanding their sensitivity, and studying the potential gravitational-wave signals they record. The gwpy.plotter module provides a number of plot classes, each representing display of a corresponding data type.

Plotting data

The majority of core data objects in GWpy come with a built-in plot() method, allowing quick display of a single data set, for example:

>>> from gwpy.timeseries import TimeSeries
>>> data = TimeSeries.fetch('H1:LDAS-STRAIN', 968654552, 968654562)
>>> plot = data.plot()
>>> plot.show()

(Source code, png)

../_images/index-1.png

Users can also import the relevant plotting class objects and generate more complicated plots manually:

>>> data2 = TimeSeries.fetch('L1:LDAS-STRAIN', 968654552, 968654562)
>>> from gwpy.plotter import TimeSeriesPlot
>>> plot2 = TimeSeriesPlot()
>>> ax2 = plot2.gca()
>>> ax2.plot(data, color='k', linestyle='--')
>>> ax2.plot(data2, color='r', linestyle=':')
>>> plot2.show()

(Source code, png)

../_images/index-2.png

Plot types

The following diagram displays the available Plot objects and their inheritance from Plot.

Inheritance diagram of core, timeseries, frequencyseries, spectrogram, table, filter

The following pages outline specific applications of some of the specialist plot types

Class reference

A full reference of the above plotting class objects can be found here.