Plotting archived satellite data in MetPy

[atmsfer]

All,

I see plenty of MetPy examples for plotting current GOES satellite imagery or even GOES imagery from a THREDDS server, but I am having trouble plotting older satellite imagery. I have a GOES-13 file from SSEC's GOES Online Geostationary Archive. I can open it as an xarray dataset with ch4 = xr.open_dataset('GOES13_d20110714_t200150_b04'), and I can even display it a tiny box, but I want to plot the imagery on an existing map with other elements, such as GFS contours and surface plots. Can you please share an example that will plot this satellite imagery on a map with a particular Cartopy projection?

Thank you!

[dopplershift]

To be clear, there's not a really a MetPy question here. This is "just" plotting a netCDF grid, opened using xarray, using Matplotlib + Cartopy:

import cartopy.crs as ccrs
import cartopy.feature as cfeature
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import xarray as xr

fig = plt.figure(figsize=(10, 10))
ax = fig.add_subplot(projection=ccrs.PlateCarree())

ch4 = xr.open_dataset('/Users/rmay/Downloads/GOES13_d20110714_t200150_b04')

ax.pcolormesh(ch4.lon, ch4.lat, ch4.data[0], cmap='Greys_r')

ax.add_feature(cfeature.COASTLINE)
ax.add_feature(cfeature.BORDERS)

ax.set_extent((-130, -50, 20, 55))

gives:

Note that I had to use pcolormesh here because imshow() only takes an image bounding box, and we'd need to know the original projection information (which isn't in the netCDF file) to properly re-project the the image data.

[atmsfer]

Thank you, @dopplershift! I hope this helps others as well.