Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) have replaced the older
data sets in most scientii c studies. Section 7.6 demonstrates how to export
3D graphics objects such as digital terrain models to create interactive
documents such as Apple iBooks Author documents or interactive Adobe
PDF documents, in particular for use with tablet computers.
h e second part of this chapter deals with the estimation of continuous
surfaces from unevenly-spaced data and the statistics of spatial data
(Sections 7.7 to 7.8). In earth sciences, most data are collected in an irregular
pattern. Access to rock samples is ot en restricted to natural outcrops such
as shoreline clif s and the walls of a gorge, or anthropogenic outcrops such
as road cuttings and quarries. h e sections on interpolating such unevenly-
spaced data illustrate the use of the most important gridding routines and
outline the potential pitfalls when using these methods. Sections 7.9 to 7.11
introduce various methods for statistically analyzing spatial data, including
the application of statistical tests to point distributions (Section 7.9), the
spatial analysis of digital elevation models (Section 7.10), and an overview of
geostatistics and kriging (Section 7.11).
h is chapter requires the Mapping Toolbox (MathWorks 2014a), although
most graphics routines used in our examples can be easily replaced by
standard MATLAB functions. Section 7.6 requires Simulink 3D Animation
to create animated 3D graphics objects (MathWorks 2014b). An alternative
and useful mapping toolbox by Rich Pawlowicz (Earth and Ocean Sciences,
at the University of British Columbia) is available from
http://www.eos.ubc.ca/~rich/
h e handling and processing of large spatial data sets requires a computing
system with at least 4 GB physical memory.
7.2 The Global Geography Database GSHHG
h e Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Geography
(GSHHG) database is an amalgamation of two public domain databases by
Paul Wessel (SOEST, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI) and Walter Smith
(NOAA Laboratory for Satellite Altimetry, Silver Spring, MD) (Wessel and
Smith 1996). h e GSHHG database combines the older GSHHS database
(Soluri and Woodson 1990, Wessel and Smith 1996), which is a shoreline
database, with the poor quality Antarctica data replaced by the more accurate
data from Bohlander and Scambos (2007), together with rivers and borders
from the CIA World Data Bank II (WDBII) (Gorny 1977). h e GSHHG data
can be downloaded from the web page of the US National Geophysical Data
Center (NGDC):
