issue_comments

Cool; please keep me in the loop if you don't mind, because I also have an application which I'd really like to just be able use the built-in faceting for rather than building my plot grids manually.

A good comparison case is to perform the same plots (with the same set aspect/size/ratio at both the figure and subplot level) but just don't use the Cartopy transformations. In these cases, I have all the control that I would expect. There are also important differences between pcoloring and imshowing which would be useful to understand. At a minimum, we should deliver back to xarray some improved documentation discussing handling subplot geometry during faceting.

@fmaussion What happens if you add aspect="auto" to subplot_kws?

I'm tempted to have us move this discussion to StackOverflow (for heightened visibility), but I suspect there might actually be a bug somewhere in the finalization of the faceting that undoes the specifications you pass to the initial subplot constructor.

The biggest trouble I have is with tightening the space between the map and the colorbar at the bottom, but this looks like a cartopy/mpl question, not an xarray question, so I should quit pestering you guys.

You just need to pass the "pad" argument to cbar_kwargs.

The trickier problem is that sometimes cartopy can be a bit unpredictable in controlling the size and aspect ratio of axes after you've plotted maps on them. You can force a plot to respect the aspect ratio you use when you construct an axis by using the keyword aspect="auto", but it can be a bit difficult to get this to work in xarray sometimes. But at the end of the day, it's not a big deal to hand-craft a publication-quality figure once you know the rough gist of what you want to go on it - and xarray's tools are already great for that.