Mapping Toolbox

Access Web Map Service (WMS) Servers

With Mapping Toolbox, you can find and download raster data from WMS servers. Many government and commercial organizations, such as NASA, ESA, USGS, NOAA, ESRI, and Microsoft, adhere to the WMS protocol for rendering, reprojecting, and serving georeferenced data sets over the Internet. Mapping Toolbox enables you to access elevation, oceanography, weather, satellite imagery, and many other raster data sets in MATLAB.

To assist with identifying WMS data layers that are appropriate to your application, the toolbox provides a prequalified database of WMS servers and layers that enables you to search for an appropriate data set by layer name, server name, location, and other terms. To request and retrieve a map with appropriate characteristics, such as spatial resolution and geographic limits, the toolbox provides functions and classes that enable you to define a custom map request, submit it to the server, and retrieve a map into a file or directly into MATLAB for processing.

Collapse of the Larsen Ice Shelf, Antarctica, over a 3-month period. Original coastline segmented using Image Processing Toolbox. Images courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.

A composite map of San Francisco created with functions in Mapping Toolbox. Data courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey and retrieved via Microsoft TerraServer.