An Introduction to Python Programming for Scientists and Engineers

Below is a 16 second repeating .mp4 video loop of the panels from Figure 14.4 in the textbook, at 2 frames per second (your browser needs to support HTML5 video). The surface/near-surface air temperature values are over the U.S.\ Midwest, at four different times (November 11, 2017, at 0:00Z, 6:00Z, 12:00Z, and 18:00Z):

Matplotlib images cannot be easily written into a .mov or .mp4 video file. Matplotlib provides other frameworks to create such animations, which we do not cover in the present work. To create the video above, we used the Linux command-line tool ffmpeg (version 2.8.17) with these options:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -t 16 -r 2 -f image2 -s 1920x1080 -i surf_temp_2-d_illinois_anim%d.png -vcodec libx264 -crf 25 -pix_fmt yuv420p surf_temp.mp4

See “Using ffmpeg to convert a set of images into a video”, https://video.stackexchange.com/a/12906, and the ffmpeg documentation for information on the above command signature.