How can I plot trajectories on top of a map?

I wish to plot different series of lat/lon values onto a map and connect together with a line (i.e. hurricane tracking).

How can I do this on Matlab?

[Salaheddin Hosseinzadeh]

please see matlab documentation or simply type these on matlab command line

doc plot
doc line
doc hold

Hope this helps.

Answer 1

[Christopher Berry]

The Mapping toolbox has a number of great functions to help out with exactly this type of thing.

If you just want the specific points you currently have as lat,lon to be translated into the map coordinates x,y,z use the function mfwdtran, like this:

[x,y,z] = mfwdtran(lat,lon,0)

Then you can use whatever method of displaying and connecting your points that you like.

Alternately, you can also use mapping specific functions, such as linem or plotm. Take a look at this example from the doc for linem:

axesm sinusoid; framem
linem([15; 0; -45; 15],[-100; 0; 100; 170],'r-')

Either way, if you also want to draw either rumb line tracks or great circle tracks connecting the locations, you can take advantage of the function track2 to generate additional lat,lon points to connect any two points. Here is the example from the doc that shows this pretty well:

% Set up the axes.
axesm('mercator','MapLatLimit',[30 50],'MapLonLimit',[-40 40])

% Calculate the great circle track.
[lattrkgc,lontrkgc] = track2(40,-35,40,35);

% Calculate the rhumb line track.
[lattrkrh,lontrkrh] = track2('rh',40,-35,40,35);

% Plot both tracks.
plotm(lattrkgc,lontrkgc,'g')
plotm(lattrkrh,lontrkrh,'r')

Basically, any plotting function in base MATLAB, just add m to the end of it and if it exists in the Mapping Toolbox, then it does basically the same thing except with lat,lon coordinates, instead of x,y,z coordinates.

Hope that helps.

[Michael]

thanks Chris!

Answer 2

[Polina Vasilyeva]

Excuse me, may be you know is it possible to plot this trajectories on the colour dependsing on the speed wind in every coordinate?