Plotting 3D Heatmap/Surf using Lat, Lon, Pressure, and a fourth Variable

Hi,

I want to plot a 3D figure that looks like heatmap or surf map using Lat, Lon, Pressure as my X, Y, and Z, then colored by a fourth variable C.

The dimension of each variable is like this:

Lat : 1D, 100 x 1

Lon : 1D, 100 x 1

Pressure : 2D, 100 x 32

C : 2D, 100 x32

The problem with using Surf function is that the Z variable must be a matrix and have the same dimension as the X and Y, which I assume should be 100 x 100. Typically this means Z is a fuction of X and Y, or Z is uniform.

Here, my pressure is 100 x 32, but each pressure level for a Lat Lon location is different... Not only Pressure is not a function of Lat and Lon, Pressure itself is not uniform among all the Lat and Lon location.

I have plotted the 3D figure using scatter3, but I want to make a plot that similar to heatmap or surf map. How do I do this?

Thank you very much for your help!

[Voss]

Can you post the code you wrote that uses scatter3?

[Ching An Yang]

I made my lat and lon as the same dimension as pressure and C, then plotted the flatten variables.

Lat_2D = ones(length(Lat),length(Pressure(1,:)));
Lat_2D = Lat_2D.*Lat;
Lon_2D = ones(length(Lon),length(Pressure(1,:)));
Lon_2D = Lon_2D.*Lon;

scatter3(Lat_2D(:),Lon_2D(:),Pressure(:)/100,8,C(:),'filled');
colorbar
set (gca,'Zdir','reverse')
xlabel("Latitude (°)")
ylabel("Longitude (°)")
zlabel("Pressure (hPa)")

Answer 1

[Pratyush]

Hi @Ching An Yang

I understand that you want to plot a 3D surface map of {Latitude, Longitude, Pressure}. Looking at the code you posted about scatter plot, I assume you have a pair {Lat(i), Lon(i)} maps to 32 different Pressure(i) values. You can plot a surf map using the following code:

% make 32 duplicate columns of Lat and Lon
Lat = repmat(Lat,32,1);
Lon = repmat(Lon,32,1);

% Plot surf map
surf(Lat, Lon, Pressure, C);

[Ching An Yang]

Thank you! That would work but it doesn't come out to be what I imagined... I wonder if my plot is shattered instead of having surfaces becuase of my Pressure values are not uniform?