How to Increase Matplotlib Basemap Size?

Question

How can I increase the size of the basemap? It is small compared to the size of the accompanying color bar. My basemap includes the geographic locations that I want, it is just physically too small. Thanks in advance for any guidance you can provide

Solution

One possibilty is to call plt.figure(figsize=(WIDTH, HEIGHT)) before you call any of the drawing methods of your map object, like so:

from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.figure(figsize=(12,6))
map = Basemap()
map.drawcoastlines()
map.plot()