Traveling somewhere soon? Visualize your flight plan on a 3d globe with the Matlab Mapping Toolbox and Plotly!
If you haven’t used Plotly with Matlab before it’s easy to get started by following these simple instructions. Additionally, latitude & longitude flight plan data can be found online on sites such as Flight Plan Database.
With the Matlab Mapping Toolbox, construct a basic globe display.
grs80 = referenceEllipsoid('grs80','km');
figure('Renderer','opengl')
ax = axesm('globe','Geoid',grs80,'Grid','on','GLineWidth',1, ...
'GLineStyle','-', 'Gcolor',[0.9 0.9 0.1],'Galtitude',100);
axis equal off
view(3)
Next, add low-resolution global topography, coastlines, and rivers to the globe.
load topo
geoshow(topo,topolegend,'DisplayType','texturemap')
demcmap(topo)
land = shaperead('landareas','UseGeoCoords',true);
plotm([land.Lat],[land.Lon],'Color','black')
rivers = shaperead('worldrivers','UseGeoCoords',true);
plotm([rivers.Lat],[rivers.Lon],'Color','blue')
To add a flight plan, create arrays of the latitude and longitude data for the flight, then plot the latitude by longitude.
flight.Lat = [ADD LATITUDES];
flight.Lon = [ADD LONGITUDES];
plotm([flight.Lat],[flight.Lon],'Color','red')
Parse the figure with the following statement:
pf = fig2plotly(gcf,'open',false,'strip',false, 'filename', ...
'ADD_YOUR_FILENAME', 'fileopt','overwrite');
Adjust the trace style (color and line width) on the Plotly figure for {1} Latitude, {2} Longitude, {3} Surface Water, {4} Land Lines, {5} Rivers, and {6} Flight Plan
For lines (in this example: everything except Surface Water):
pf.data{1}.line.color = 'rgb(80, 20, 80)';
pf.data{1}.line.width = 0.75;
pf.data{1}.name = 'Latitude';
For surfaces (in this example: Surface Water):
pf.data{3}.colorscale = {{0,'rgb(31, 119, 180)'}, {1, 'rgb(0, 0, 0)'}};
pf.data{3}.opacity = 0.4;
Adjust the layout and axes.
pf.layout.scene.bgcolor = 'rgb(0, 0, 0)';
pf.layout.showlegend = true;
In the graph below, the axes grids are hidden. Repeat the code below for the y and z axes to hide all grid information in the plot.
pf.layout.scene.xaxis.showgrid = false;
pf.layout.scene.xaxis.zeroline = false;
pf.layout.scene.xaxis.showspikes = false;
pf.layout.scene.xaxis.showticklabels = false;Finally, graph the figure online with Plotly!
pf.plotly;You can find the full matlab script and data used to make the flight plans for the figure below here!
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