python basemap close to North pole - matplotlib-basemap

Question

I want to plot some data far North using basemap. Unfortunately I cannot get the meridians to be displayed. I think this is because they are not shown north of 80 degrees. Any way to fix this?
Basically, I use this code:
from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
fig = plt.figure(num=None, figsize=(12, 8) )
m = Basemap(projection='poly', resolution=None,
lon_0=16, lat_0=81.8,
llcrnrlon=9.5, llcrnrlat=80,
urcrnrlon=22, urcrnrlat=82.5)
m.drawparallels(np.arange(80. ,82.5 ,0.5),labels=[True,False,False,False])
m.drawmeridians(np.arange(10.0, 22.0, 2.0),labels=[True,True,False,True])
m.drawmapboundary(fill_color='lightblue')
plt.show()
which produces this figure:
But I want the meridians to be also displayed. How to do this?

Answer 1

Your findings are some of many shortcomings that exist in Basemap. That's the reason why Cartopy was created. For a simple workaround to get your plot done, you can use plot() function to draw the missing meridional curves as follows.
from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
fig = plt.figure(num=None, figsize=(12, 8))
m = Basemap(projection='poly', resolution=None,
lon_0=16, lat_0=81.8,
llcrnrlon=9.5, llcrnrlat=80,
urcrnrlon=22, urcrnrlat=82.5)
m.drawparallels(np.arange(80.0, 83.0, 0.5), labels=[True,False,False,False])
# this does not fully work, only labels are rendered, but not lines
m.drawmeridians(np.arange(10.0, 22.0, 2.0), labels=[True,True,False,True])
# a workaround to get meridians plotted
phs = np.arange(80, 83, 0.05)
for ea in np.arange(8.0, 22.0, 2.0):
lds = np.ones(len(phs))*ea
m.plot(lds, phs, latlon=True, color="k", linewidth=0.5)
m.drawmapboundary(fill_color='lightblue')
plt.show()
The resulting plot: