Mapping Toolbox

Apply Geometric Geodesy, Map Projections, and Utilities

Geometric Geodesy

With Mapping Toolbox, you can perform geometric geodesy to enable calculations that account for the curvature of Earth and other planetary bodies. You can find the surface area of arbitrary polygons or quadrangles on spheres and ellipsoids, calculate the intersections of geometric objects, compute the distance between points on a sphere or ellipsoid, and find the overlapping area between polygons. Navigation functionality enables you to perform tasks such as calculating and correcting for wind and current vectors based on heading and air or ground speed.

The toolbox also provides 3D coordinate transformations between geodetic and geocentric coordinate systems. These provide key functionality when implementing Helmert transformations and 3D datum transformations that you would need, for example, to combine data referenced to WGS84 with legacy maps based on older datums.

Weather data on top of satellite imagery for the continental United States. Image Processing Toolbox is used to segment the primary storm from national weather data, and geodetic calculations are made using Mapping Toolbox to find the area of the storm. Data courtesy of NOAA, as retrieved via the Iowa Environmental Mesonet WMS Server, and NASA-JPL/Caltech.

Map Projections

Mapping Toolbox contains more than 65 of the most popular and important map projections for displaying the curved surface of planetary bodies on a 2D map display. They include equal-area, equidistant, conformal, and compromise projections in the cylindrical, conic, and azimuthal classes. The toolbox also supports projections in the PROJ.4 library and the UTM/UPS systems. Many projections support both spherical and ellipsoidal models of Earth and other bodies.

With the toolbox, you can apply forward and inverse transformations of positions and direction angles or azimuths, enabling the reprojection of vector data into alternative systems. Raster and image data displays can be projected in map visualizations to match the coordinate systems of other data sets. You can also explore the properties of your projection by trimming the data to a particular latitude-longitude extent, calculating distortion parameters at a point, or visualizing map distortions as Tissot Indicatrices or scale-distortion contours.

Mercator, Mollweide, and sinusoidal projections (clockwise from top). Images courtesy NASA-JPL/Caltech.

Geographic Data Utilities

With Mapping Toolbox, you can work with vector data as X-Y or latitude-longitude vectors or as structures where other metadata can be maintained and organized. In both cases, the toolbox provides functionality to help you manipulate the data, including splitting, merging, and reordering data points. It also provides functionality to interpolate between waypoints and increase the sample density of your data with several interpolation techniques.

Many functions are available to work with raster, image, and other grid-based data. You can modify spatial resolution, convert pixel indices to map coordinates, and extrapolate irregularly sampled data points into a grid. Other Mapping Toolbox utility functions enable you to manipulate data structures within MATLAB, perform unit and angle conversions, wrap longitude and azimuth angles, and format angle and distance strings.

Google Earth image showing historical earthquake data. Utility functions from Mapping Toolbox are used to locate, extract, and write latitude-longitude coordinates of historical earthquake data from 1980 to 1995 (inset) to a KML file, and the resulting data is viewed in Google Earth. Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.