gmt-fork/doc/rst/source/gallery/ex51.rst

.. _example_51:

(51) OpenStreetMap coastlines in GMT
------------------------------------

This example shows how to use coastlines derived from the `OpenStreetMap (OSM)
project <https://www.openstreetmap.org/>`_ in GMT. When working with the high
resolution SRTM :doc:`/datasets` provided by GMT, the GSHHG coastlines might
not be precise enough on small scales. Here comes the OSM project to the rescue
as it provides high resolution coastlines in the WGS84 datum. Not as convenient
and fast as GSHHG but easy enough to give it a try – as long as you have GDAL
installed, space on your hard drive and some processor cycles to spare.

.. note::

    This example makes use of data provided by third parties outside the GMT
    universe. As the internet is constantly changing, the source of this data
    might move or vanish altogether.

First we need to download the appropriate shape file. The `OSM Wiki
<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Shapefiles#Obtaining_shapefiles_from_OSM_data>`_
has some sources, `this <https://osmdata.openstreetmap.de/data/land-polygons.html>`_
is the one we are going to use. The nice people of the `German FOSSGIS society
<https://www.fossgis.de>`_ already did some of the heavylifting and converted
the OSM coastlines to a shape file for us. Make sure to get the *Land Polygon*
in the *Large polygons not split* version with WGS84 datum from their `download
page <https://osmdata.openstreetmap.de/data/land-polygons.html>`_. It’s a
~630 MB download.

If your GMT installation comes with GDAL support then you are able to make use
of this file right away as GMT converts it under the hood to something more
useful on the fly. Neither very fast nor very efficient if you want to use the
file multiple times and have to deal with large file sizes as we do here. So we
use GDAL's ``ogr2ogr`` and convert the shape file to a native GMT format.

As the resulting raw ASCII file is very large (>1 GB), GMT's :doc:`/gmtconvert`
is used to reduce the file size to a third by converting it to a
single-precision binary file. The resulting file is smaller than the initial
download while still maintaining precision in the range of centimeters.

To speed up the plotting process even more, we extract the region of interest
with :doc:`/gmtselect`. Finally we are all set to use the coastlines with
:doc:`/plot` to get nice, precise coastlines in our illustrations.

.. literalinclude:: /_verbatim/ex51.txt
   :language: bash

.. figure:: /_images/ex51.*
   :width: 500 px
   :align: center

   Comparison of GSHHG and OSM coastlines.