Arg. It's always the last thing you try:
quadmesh.set_clim(vmin=0, vmax=15)
works.
Matplotlib 1.3.1 - It looks like the colorbar ticks are only drawn when the colorbar is instanced. Changing the colorbar limits (set_clim) does not cause the ticks to be re-drawn.
The solution I found was to re-instance the colorbar in the same axes entry as the original colorbar. In this case, axes[1] was the original colorbar. Added a new instance of the colorbar with this designated with the cax= (child axes) kwarg.
# Reset the Z-axis limits
print "resetting Z-axis plot limits", self.zmin, self.zmax
self.cbar = self.fig.colorbar(CS1, cax=self.fig.axes[1]) # added
self.cbar.set_clim(self.zmin, self.zmax)
self.cbar.draw_all()
If you didn't keep the returned image object, you can use pylab.gci to get the current ScalarMappable (i.e. whatever the current colorbar would be based on).
From there, you just want the get_clim method of the ScalarMappable object.
So, you could do:
vmin, vmax = plt.gci().get_clim()
Found a 2006 mailing list conversation showing me the way:
im = pylab.imshow(arr)
pylab.clim(im.norm.vmax - numpy.array([0.5, 0]))
To get this right you need to have all the images with the same intensity scale, otherwise the colorbar() colours are meaningless. To do that, use the vmin and vmax arguments of imshow(), and make sure they are the same for all your images.
E.g., if the range of values you want to show goes from 0 to 10, you can use the following:
import pylab as plt
import numpy as np
my_image1 = np.linspace(0, 10, 10000).reshape(100,100)
my_image2 = np.sqrt(my_image1.T) + 3
plt.subplot(1, 2, 1)
plt.imshow(my_image1, vmin=0, vmax=10, cmap='jet', aspect='auto')
plt.subplot(1, 2, 2)
plt.imshow(my_image2, vmin=0, vmax=10, cmap='jet', aspect='auto')
plt.colorbar()

When the ranges of data (data1 and data2) sets are unknown and you want to use the same colour bar for both/all plots, find the overall minimum and maximum to use as vmin and vmax in the call to imshow:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=1, ncols=2)
# generate randomly populated arrays
data1 = np.random.rand(10,10)*10
data2 = np.random.rand(10,10)*10 -7.5
# find minimum of minima & maximum of maxima
minmin = np.min([np.min(data1), np.min(data2)])
maxmax = np.max([np.max(data1), np.max(data2)])
im1 = axes[0].imshow(data1, vmin=minmin, vmax=maxmax,
extent=(-5,5,-5,5), aspect='auto', cmap='viridis')
im2 = axes[1].imshow(data2, vmin=minmin, vmax=maxmax,
extent=(-5,5,-5,5), aspect='auto', cmap='viridis')
# add space for colour bar
fig.subplots_adjust(right=0.85)
cbar_ax = fig.add_axes([0.88, 0.15, 0.04, 0.7])
fig.colorbar(im2, cax=cbar_ax)
