polar-style direction plot

Hi guys

I have a wind-detector set up to monitor wind directions [angle=0-360 degrees] for a period of time, T. In order to visualize the wind direction over time I was considering making a polar-style plot in which the distance between the center and the circumference represents the time T and the wind-direction would be represented by a line navigating within the circle depending on time and angle.

How can I do this in matlab?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

[Paulo Silva]

doc quiver

quiver documentation

example

%create fake data to plot with quiver
a=360*rand(1,10); %create 10 angle values of the wind angle
s=10*rand(1,10);  %create 10 strength values of the wind 
u=s.*cosd(a);     %convert the angle to length of the arrow (x value) 
v=s.*sind(a);     %convert the angle to length of the arrow (y value) 
quiver(1:10,zeros(1,10),u,v) %do the quiver
axis([-1 12 -5 5])           %select the axes range so you can see it all

[Jakob Sievers]

Hi again. This is not exactly what I had in mind. I messed around a bit with polar-plots and figured it out after a while. Here's a simple example, where yy is a set of fake wind-direction data with noise:

T=1:2000;

y=.2*sin(.003*T)+.4+(randn(1,length(T))./50);

yy=y.*360;

polar(yy*(pi/180),T,'-r')

Thanks for the help though!

[Paulo Silva]

nice one, much better than my code :) but it doesn't account for wind strength, ok your data doesn't have that info :) good work