Saving plot from .nc file without showing the plot

Question

I am trying to save the sequence of plots of 24 hours of ERA5 data from .nc file without plotting them. I am using xarray for reading .nc data. Here is my code:

import xarray as xr
import matplotlib.image as img

data = 'wind.nc'
DS = xr.open_dataset(data)['u10']
fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 1, figsize=(7, 3.5))
for i in range(24):
    x = '2022-01-31T0' + str(i) + ':00'
    y = str(i) + '.PNG'
    DS.sel(time=x).plot(cmap='bone')
    plt.title('U Wind Component')
    plt.axis('off')
    plt.savefig(y, bbox_inches='tight')

Is there any way to accomplish this without showing the plots or any other library that does the job?

Answer 1

Writing plt.close(fig) at the end of your script should avoid the plot from showing, while still saving the figure.

However I believe there is another problem in your script. You create a fig and ax but in the loop they are not referenced so with every DS.plot() you create a new figure. Rather I would write it as follows:

for i in range(24):
    fig, ax = plt.subplots()
    x = '2022-01-31T0' + str(i) + ':00'
    y = str(i) + '.PNG'
    DS.sel(time=x).plot(ax = ax, cmap='bone')
    plt.title('U Wind Component')
    plt.axis('off')
    fig.savefig("figname.png", bbox_inches='tight')
    plt.close(fig)