Understanding the pygmt makecpt command

Q&A PyGMT Q&A
1

Hi there!
I am struggling to understand the pygmt.makecpt() method in pygmt (https://www.pygmt.org/latest/api/generated/pygmt.makecpt.html). The command is
pygmt.makecpt(*, transparency=None, cmap=None, background=None, color_model=None, truncate=None, output=None, reverse=None, overrule_bg=None, no_bg=None, log=None, series=None, verbose=None, categorical=None, cyclic=None, continuous=None, kwargs )

I am able to understand few arguments such as transparency, background, etc. But the major commands such as cmap and color_model are elusive. I simply use the following simple commands to generate colormaps, but its difficult to make customized colorbars with these cpt.
gmt.makecpt(cmap="jet", series=[0, 1, 0.1],reverse=False, background='o')

If someone can help this by providing an example, this would be really helpful.

Thank you
Regards
Kumar

2

cmap stands for “color map”, which is a standard denomination for the color schemes.

For example cmap=hot uses color gradients from red to black , rainbow uses rainbow colors, gray uses shades of gray (from whitish to blackish) … so on (you can find them in the doc)

color_model refers to the encoding used (RGB or HSV).

I advise to read the GMT Doc concerning the makecpt module to get a better grasp of the options and their meaning.