reading ascii grid data

Hello,

I have an ascii file in the form of:

lat lon var
38.0625 -75.4375 0.315
38.0625 -75.5625 0.284
38.0625 -75.6875 0.260
38.0625 -75.8125 0.268

and I'm first trying to read in this data using asciiread and then
hopefully be able to produce a contour plot against a map; however
I'm stuck at how to properly extract the latitude/longitudes from the
file. I've seen the example at:

http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/Applications/ascii_grid.shtml

however, for that instance the data being read appears to be a nice
rectangular grid (e.g., 240 by 89, which equals the number of lines
in the data file, 240x89 = 2130). I'm wondering is it possible to
read in a grid that isn't a rectangular grid? For my case, I have
3862 lat/lon points (or lines in my file) to read in; however, in
that set there are 80 unique lats and 110 unique lons, which I
believe would then make a rectangular grid of 8800 total lat/lons.
In order to do a similar approach to the example, do I need to create
bogus values for the lat/lon points that aren't in my original set of
data and then read in the entire 8800 points, or is there an
alternative method to reading this data in so that I can produce a
contour plot using the lat/lons in my file?

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

Jeff Van Dorn
Atmos Research
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Received on Mon Mar 20 2006 - 09:52:22 MST