Is it possible to display 2D array as polar plot using Matplotlib imshow()?

Question

I'm new to matplotlib (and am loving it!), but am getting frustrated. I have a polar grid represented as a a 2D array. (rows are radial sections, columns are azimuthal sections)

I've been able to display the 2D array as both a rectangular image (R vs. theta) using pyplot.imshow() and as a polar plot using pyplot.pcolor(). However, pcolor() is painfully slow for the size of the arrays I'm using, so I want to be able to display the array as a polar grid using imshow().

Using pcolor(), this is as simple as setting polar=True for the subplot. Is there any way to display the 2D array as a polar plot using imshow()? without having to do coordinate transformations on the entire array? Thanks in advance

Answer 1

After some research I discovered the pcolormesh() function, which has proven to be significantly faster than using pcolor() and comparable to the speed of imshow().

Here is my solution:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

#...some data processing

theta,rad = np.meshgrid(used_theta, used_rad) #rectangular plot of polar data
X = theta
Y = rad

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.pcolormesh(X, Y, data2D) #X,Y & data2D must all be same dimensions
plt.show()