Documentation available: http://matplotlib.org/cmocean/.

We have a paper with guidelines to colormap selection for your application and a description of the cmocean colormaps: Thyng, K. M., Greene, C. A., Hetland, R. D., Zimmerle, H. M., & DiMarco, S. F. (2016). True colors of oceanography. Oceanography, 29(3), 10. link: http://tos.org/oceanography/assets/docs/29-3_thyng.pdf

Besides Python, the cmocean colormaps are also available:

• For MATLAB by Chad Greene
• For R cmocean, which includes ggplot2 compatible functions. Also included in Oce: an oceanographic analysis package by Dan Kelley and Clark Richards.
• For Julia, included in Plots.jl and Makie.jl
• For Ocean Data Viewer
• For Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) at cpt-city and on github
• For Paraview inspired by Phillip Wolfram
• In Plotly
• Chad Greene's Antarctic Mapping Tools in Matlab uses cmocean
• For Tableau as a preferences file on github
• For ImageJ as LUTs
• For ncview via ncmaps.
• For SeaDAS, and should work with BEAM/SNAP as well.

To install: pip install cmocean

To install with Anaconda: conda install -c conda-forge cmocean

If you want to be able to use the plots submodule, you can instead install with:

pip install "cmocean[plots]"

which will also install viscm and colorspacious.