Rignot2011Ice

This example shows how to mimic Figure 1 of Rignot, Mouginot, and Scheuchl's 2011 Science paper titled Ice Flow of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Requirements
Define a color map
Plot ice speed
Overlay drainage basins
Overlay a graticule
Format colorbar
Author Info

Requirements

This example requires

Define a color map

First we define a color map using rgbmap. The colors I'm picking here are just a guess, but I am colorblind, so you'll probably do better picking colors yourself:

cmap = rgbmap('pinkish brown','tan','light yellow','light grass green',...
    'aqua','dark blue','magenta','red');

Plot ice speed

The measures function plots ice easily:

measures('speed','colormap',cmap,'colorbar','northoutside')

Overlay drainage basins

This step is pretty straigtforward:

basins

Overlay a graticule

Rignot et al. use a gray graticule every 10 degrees latitude on the fives, and every 30 degrees longitude:

antmap('graticule','lats',-85:10:-65,'lons',0:30:150,...
    'color',[.5 .5 .5],'linewidth',.2,'frame','off','linestyle',':')

Format colorbar

Tweaking the colorbar on a log scale plot can be a little tricky. First we get the handle of the current colorbar, then set its location and tick marks. Then add a label.

cb = findobj(gcf,'tag','Colorbar');
set(cb,'location','north','position',[.15 .85 .3 .04],...
    'xtick',[log10(1.5) 1 2 3]','xticklabel',{num2str([1.5 10 100 1000]')})
xlabel(cb,'velocity magnitude [m/yr]')

Author Info

Chad Greene wrote this example file. Chad claims absolutely no credit for the underlying data. See the measures function documentation for proper data citation.