Mapping sea surface temp with specific location? Struggling with geoshow function?

Hello! Thank you for looking at my question I need a little bit of help with my code I am trying to plot sea surface temperature in the Baltic Sea for my uni coursework and plot it on a map on matlab with colour change gradients and contours however, I have been having very little luck with making the geoshow function work. My SST data ends up 3 dimensional and wont combine with my latitude and longtitude which are 2D variable and im not sure why that is I will attach my code here. my sst variable ends up being 383 x 523 x 56 double and my latitude one is 523x383 single, I have tried reshaping as well as putting it into just the two columns but then its not the same size. Any help would be much appreciated, thank you in advance! I have had a few attempts at reshaping which are percentaged below.

clc; close all ;
    
    ncfile = 'CMEMS_BAL_PHY_reanalysis_monthlymeans_200809.nc' ; %loads temperature file
    ncdisp(ncfile) %info about ncfile
    
    sst = ncread(ncfile, 'thetao');
    lon = ncread(ncfile,'longitude');
    lat = ncread(ncfile,'latitude');
    % Read in the sea_ice_fraction data and store in a new variable called ice:
    %gets sea surface temperature value
    time = ncread(ncfile,'time') ; nt = length(time) ; %reads the time variable and obtains its size
    
    [X,Y] = meshgrid(lon,lat) ; % transform longitudes and latitudes into a grid of lon long x lat dimension
    %% in case salinty wants to be used
    %ncfileS = 'woa18_decav_s00_04.nc' ; %loads salinity file
    sal = ncread(ncfile,'so'); %defines salinity variable
    %%generates map
    
    figure('Color','white'); %creates figure
    
    ax=worldmap([45 90],[-45 45]); % loads world map with the limits for BALTICS
    
    %newx= reshape(X, 383, 523);
    %
    
    %nsst = permute(sst,[1 3 2]);
    %nsst = reshape(nsst,[],size(sst,2),1);
    %nsst= reshape(sst, []);
    
    %setm(ax,'mapprojection','mercator','Origin', [180 0 180]) %changes projection and changes origin reference for coordinates
    levels=[ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 ]; % creates levels for contours
    geoshow(double(Y),double(X),sst,'DisplayType','texturemap') %creates surface map of temperature
    
    
    cb = contourcbar('peer',ax,'Location','northoutside'); %creates colorbar
    caxis([15 35]) %defines limits for colorbar
    colormap(jet) %sets color scheme
    
      set(get(cb,'XLabel'),'String','SST (^oC)') %title for color bar
      set(cb,'Position',[0.23 0.2417 0.5750 0.0335]) %adjust location and size of color bar
      
    %levels=[28]; %sets level for contour defining specific
    geoshow(double(Y),double(X),nsst,'DisplayType', 'contour','LevelList',levels,'LineColor','black') %plots temperature contour defining the western Pacific Warm Pool
    hold on 
    land = shaperead('landareas.shp', 'UseGeoCoords', true); %define land areas
    geoshow(land, 'FaceColor', [0 0 0]) % plots land areas in black

[Rik]

I recovered the removed content from the Google cache (something which anyone can do). Editing away your question is very rude. Someone spent time reading your question, understanding your issue, figuring out the solution, and writing an answer. Now you repay that kindness by ensuring that the next person with a similar question can't benefit from this answer.

Answer 1

[Chad Greene]

For 3D data cubes of things like ocean temperature, you most often need to permute the first two dimensions when reading in from a netcdf. That would look like this for your data:

sst = permute(ncread(ncfile, 'thetao'),[2 1 3]);

To make a 2D map of this 3D data, you'll need to either pick a single time slice and plot it like this:

pcolorm(Lat,Lon,sst(:,:,3))

to plot the third map of SST data in the time series. Or perhaps you wish to plot the average SST map for all of your data. That would look like this:

pcolorm(Lat,Lon,mean(sst,3,'omitnan'))

which calculates the mean long the third dimension (time) and omits any missing data values if there are any.

A side note: As a matter of style, it's generally best if you can avoid using the variable names X and Y to mean longitude and latitude, because X and Y often refer to projected coordinates which are in meters, rather than degrees. In my own work, I typically use lowercase lon and lat for 1D arrays and uppercase Lon and Lat for 2D grids of longitdue and latitude. That would look like

[Lon,Lat] = meshgrid(lon,lat); 

[Daryna Butash]

This is super helpful thank you so much! I don't think I will plot in 3d just because of ease of relaying my figures but I will definitely give it a try! Your suggestion helped my code work thank you again for the help.