Strange colorbar ticks, not standard form

I am finding the behaviour of matlab odd when I am making contourf plots. The data I have is low amplitude so typically the data is of the order of 10^{-4} - 10^{-5}. Sometimes the colorbars will have ticks like -10,0,10,20 and have a factor of 10^{-5} and others will have ticks like -1,0,1,2 and have a factor of 10^{-5} above them. Clearly this data of the same order and I am finding this misleading as it appears at a glance the data are of different orders of magnitude.

Is there any way to force this exponent to be 10^{-4} for all the plots? Or at least a quick way to change this so the tics are spaced in the same way?

I am using the following code to generate three subplots:

figure
subplot(3,1,1); 
contourf(om1_rng(om1lg)/1e4,om3_rng(om3lg)/1e4,squeeze(GSB2),size(CMRmap,1))
 colormap(CMRmap);  colorbar;  caxis([min1,max1]);

subplot(3,1,2); 
contourf(om1_rng(om1lg)/1e4,om3_rng(om3lg)/1e4,squeeze(SE2),size(CMRmap,1))
 colormap(CMRmap); colorbar;  caxis([min2,max2]);

subplot(3,1,3);  
contourf(om1_rng(om1lg)/1e4,om3_rng(om3lg)/1e4,squeeze(ESA2),size(CMRmap,1))
colormap(CMRmap); colorbar;  caxis([min3,max3]);