MATLAB: How to calculate the area of each grid cell

areagrid celllatitude bandsnetcdf

I have gridded data of air temperature with the spatial resolution 1.25 x 1.25 degrees (lon-lat). The data covers the Northern Hemisphere, and the first latitude is 90 degrees.
I need to calculate the area of each grid cell, and my approach is to do that from the latitude bands.
An alternative could be to read in the area of each grid cell directly from the netCDF file. Is that possible in MATLAB?
Here is my code I have tried; I am not sure if that is correct.
i=1:72;
j=2:73;
R=6371; % Earth's radius in km^2
deltalon=1.25; 
area=(pi/180)*R^2*((sind(latitude(i)) - sind(latitude(j)))*deltalon); % Area of each grid cell in km^2

Best Answer

The easiest way is to use the cdtarea function in the Climate Data Toolbox for Matlab. For gridded coordinates Lat,Lon, syntax is just 
A = cdtarea(Lat,Lon);
for area in square meters, or 
A = cdtarea(Lat,Lon,'km2');
for area in square kilometers.
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