I have a list of locations given in lat and long. How can I graph them in a sphere so that it looks like a globe?
MATLAB: How to create a spherical graph with points that are latitude and longitude
spherical cooridinates
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You can do this easily with the standard matlab function sph2cart. Treat the lines of latitude and longitude separately like this:
R = 6371; % earth radius in km
latspacing = 10; lonspacing = 20; % lines of longitude:
[lon1,lat1] = meshgrid(-180:lonspacing:180,linspace(-90,90,300)); [x1,y1,z1] = sph2cart(lon1*pi/180,lat1*pi/180,R); plot3(x1,y1,z1,'-','color',0.5*[1 1 1])hold on% lines of latitude:
[lat2,lon2] = meshgrid(-90:latspacing:90,linspace(-180,180,300)); [x2,y2,z2] = sph2cart(lon2*pi/180,lat2*pi/180,R); plot3(x2,y2,z2,'-','color',0.5*[1 1 1])axis equal tight off
And since you can see all the way through the globe, perhaps you want to put an opaque sphere inside the globe. Do that like this. I'm making the sphere 0.99 times the size of the Earth just to make sure it doesn't overlap the lines of lat and lon:
[X,Y,Z] = sphere(100); surf(X*R*.99,Y*R*.99,Z*R*.99,'facecolor','w','edgecolor','none')
For a little context, I'll also convert national borders to cartesian coordinates in the same way. You'll need the data from my borders function for this part:
C = load('borderdata.mat');for k = 1:246 [xtmp,ytmp,ztmp] = sph2cart(deg2rad(C.lon{k}),deg2rad(C.lat{k}),R); plot3(xtmp,ytmp,ztmp,'k') end
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