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The last couple of weeks I have been experimenting with Google Maps trying to draw filled polygons that look alright. I’m using matplotlib for making the polygons and I’ve figured out that the output from contourf(…) is like a plotting routine where you first get a polygon that should be filled with the current level and the following ones are holes in it. Before I just draw them all, coloring the holes with a lower color. This forced me to sort the polygons according to size which worked ok but didn’t look good.

Google Maps is great, you get an extremely nice background map for free. I know that there are alternatives (Bing, OpenLayers, etc) out there but since I’m running Google App Engine it seems easier to go Google all the way. I’m plotting polygons and polylines (that’s what weather is about) and it works great but my input data is kind of sparse so the polygons look very rough. To improve them I’m using b-splines. Found a very nice article here. I just changed the javascript so it works with lat/lon-arrays and the output is an array of google.maps.LatLng.