How to create a spherical graph with points that are latitude and longitude?

I have a list of locations given in lat and long. How can I graph them in a sphere so that it looks like a globe?

Answer 1

[Santa Raghavan]

MathWorks provides a Mapping Toolbox to analyze and visualize geographic information.

Here is a useful link: Mapping toolbox

To plot and visualize a geographical location on a globe, see this example: Mesh over a globe

[Hari Hablani]

But my latitude-longitude pairs are not on the Earth. Instead, they are in the inertial space. So, how do I draw the lat-lon plot on an inertial sphere without referring to the Earth?

Answer 2

[Chad Greene]

If you don't have the Mapping Toolbox, you can always use the standard Matlab function sph2cart to represent the Earth as a sphere of radius 6371 km like this:

lat = 180*rand(500,1)-90; 
lon = 360*rand(500,1); 
T = 15+10*cosd(lat); 

[x,y,z] = sph2cart(deg2rad(lon),deg2rad(lat),6371); 

scatter3(x,y,z,40,T,'filled'); 
axis tight equal 

cmocean thermal

Above I used the cmocean thermal colormap, but you can skip that line if you prefer. To put those data points in context, I'll use border data from my borders function, convert the borders to cartesian coordinates the same way as above, and plot with the scattered points:

hold on
C = load('borderdata.mat');
for k = 1:246
   [xtmp,ytmp,ztmp] = sph2cart(deg2rad(C.lon{k}),deg2rad(C.lat{k}),6371);
   plot3(xtmp,ytmp,ztmp,'k') 
end
axis off

[Chad Greene]

I answered a similar question here, where I also made the globe opaque and included lines of latitude and longitude.