CONTOUR MAPS
Display contour maps over any contour range and contour interval or specify only the contour levels you want to display on the map. With Surfer, you can add color fill between contours to produce dazzling displays of your maps or produce gray scale fills for dramatic black and white printouts.
Contour Map Features
Load any number of base maps on a page.
Base maps can be imported from DXF, BLN, WMF, TIF, PCX, LGO, BMP, BNA, GSB, PLT, CLP, TGA, PCX, DLG, LGS, SHP, MIF, JPG, PNG, DCX, WPG, PCT, USGS SDTS DDF, and other formats. It is easy to overlay a base map on a contour or surface wireframe map, allowing you to display geographic information in combination with the three dimensional data.
Base Map Features
Map Overlays
Map overlays give you a way to combine any number of contour, wireframe, vector, base, and post maps. Draping a filled contour map over a wireframe map produces the most striking display of three dimensional data possible. And because you can overlay any number of maps, you can show any amount of data on a single map.
Use color zones, independent X,Y, Z scaling, orthographic or perspective projections at any tilt or rotation angle, and different combinations of X, Y and Z lines to produce exactly the surface you want.
3D Wireframe Map Features
- Display any combination of X,Y, or Z lines
- Use automatic or user-defined color zones to highlight different contour levels
- Stack any number of 3D surfaces on a single page
- Overlay any combination of contour, filled contour, base, post, and classed post maps on a surface
- Views of the top or bottom of the surface, or both
- Smoothed or unsmoothed surface lines
- Independent scaling in the X,Y, and Z dimensions
- Full control over axis tick marks and tick labels
- Add a base with optional vertical base lines
- Display the surface at any rotation or tilt angle
You can create vector maps from information in one grid or two separated grids. The two components of the vector map, direction and magnitude, are automatically generated from a single grid by computing the gradient of the represented surface.
At any given grid node, the direction of the arrow points in the direction of the steepest descent. The direction of the arrow changes from grid node to grid node depending on the information surrounding the grid node. Magnitude of the arrow changes depending on the steepness of the descent. Two-grid vector maps use two separate grid files to determine the vector direction and magnitude.
Vector Map Features
- Define arrow style, color, and frequency
- Symbol color may be fixed or based on vector magnitude
- Display map scales, color scale bars, and vector scale legends
- Scale the arrow shaft length, head length, and width
- Control vector symbol origin
- Choose from linear, logarithmic, or square root scaling methods
Image maps use different colors to represent elevations of a grid file. Surfer automatically blends colors between percentage values so you end up with a smooth color gradation over the map.
You can add color anchors at any percentage point between 0 and 100. Each anchor point can be assigned a unique color, and the colors are automatically blended between adjacent anchor points. This allows you to create color maps using any combination of colors. Any color fill you choose for an image map can be used with any other image map, even if the associated grid files cover distinctly different Z ranges.
Image Map Features
- Pixel maps or smoothed images
- Dither bitmaps if needed
- Create an associated color scale
- Create custom color spectrum files for use on any image or shaded relief map
- Overlay image maps with contour, post, or base maps
- Data-independent color spectrum files
- Specify color for missing data
Create post maps independent of other maps on the page, or overlay the posted points on a base, contour, vector, or surface map.
For each posted point, specify the symbol and label type, size, and angle. Also create classed post maps that identify different ranges of data by automatically assigning a different symbol to each data range. Post your original data point locations on a contour map to show the distribution of data points on the map, and to demonstrate the accuracy of the gridding methods you use.
Post Map Features
- Create any number of post maps on a single page
- Post from any number of files
- Use proportional or fixed size symbols
- Full control of symbol style, color, and frequency
- Post data on contour, vector, surface, or base maps
- Post every point or every nth point
- Rotate and tilt post maps to any angle
- Make a Classed Post Map to post different symbols for specified ranges of data values
- Create a classed post legend to display the symbols and data ranges
- Specify custom symbols from the worksheet
- Add labels from a data file and adjust the angle of the label and the plane in which the label appears
- Change data files without resetting post map and classed post map parameters
DATA INTERPOLATION AND GRIDDING
Data can be randomly dispersed over the map area, and Surfer\\\\\\\'s gridding will interpolate your data onto a grid.
Several gridding methods are available to choose from, so you can produce exactly the map you want. With each gridding method you have complete control over the gridding parameters. Or if your data is already collected in a regular rectangular array, you can create a map directly from your data.
Gridding Features
- Interpolate from up to 5 million XYZ data points
- Produce grids with up to 100 million nodes
- Specify faults and breaklines when gridding
- Choose from one of the powerful gridding methods: Inverse Distance, Kriging, Minimum Curvat
- Polynomial Regression, Triangulation, Nearest Neighbor, Shepard\\\\\\\'s Method, Radial Basis Functions,and Natural Neighbor for the gridding operation
- Specify isotropic or anisotropic weighting. You have full control over the grid line geometry including grid limits, grid spacing, and number of grid lines
- Specify search ellipses at any orientation and scaling
- Use spline or matrix smoothing to smooth the grid file
- Use grid math to perform mathematic operations between grid files
- Use Nearest Neighbor to create grid files without interpolation
- Use Triangulation to achieve accuracy with large data sets faster
- Detrend a surface using Polynomial Regression and generate regression coefficients in a report
- Use data exclusion filters to eliminate unwanted data
- Use duplicate data resolution techniques
- Generate a grid of Kriging standard deviations
- Specify point or block Kriging
- Generate a report of the gridding statistics and parameters
- Specify scales and range for each variogram model
- Extract subsets of grids or DEMs based on rows and columns
- Transform, offset, rescale, rotate, and mirror grids
- Calculate first and second directional derivatives at user-specified orientations
- Calculate differential and integral operators utilizing gradient, Laplacian, biharmonic, and integrated volume operators
- Analyze your data with Fourier and spectral analysis with Correlograms and Peridograms
- Generate grids from a user-specified function of two variables
Gridding Variograms
Use the variogram modeling subsystem to quantitatively assess the spatial continuity of data. Variograms may be used to select an appropriate variogram model when gridding with the Kriging algorithm. Surfer uses a variogram grid as a fundamental internal data representation and once this grid is built, any experimental variogram can be computed instantaneously.
Variogram Features
Display both the experimental variogram and the variogram model.
Specify the estimator type: variogram, standardized variogram, auto covariance, or auto correlation.
Specify the variogram model components: exponential, Gaussian, linear, logarithmic, nugget effect, power, quadratic, rational quadratic, spherical, or wave
Customize the variogram to display symbols, variance, and number of pairs for each lag
Define faults and breaklines when gridding your data. The data on one side of the fault will not be directly used to calculate grid node values on the other side of the fault.
Use breaklines to define streamlines, ridges, and other breaks in slopes. The gridding methods that support faults and breaklines are: Inverse Distance to a Power, Kriging, Minimum Curvature, Nearest Neighbor, and Radial Basis Functions.
USGS Digital Elevation Model (DEM) Files
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Use DEM files with any Surfer command that uses GRD files
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Directly use the SDTS DEM file format in native form
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Display information about the DEM
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Create contour, vector, shaded relief, image, and wireframe maps from DEM files
Digitize Boundaries
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Find X-Y coordinates
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Automatically write coordinates to ASCII data files
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Automatically save digitized coordinates as BLN files
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Create boundary files for use with other maps
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Display different properties for base map features
Active X Automation
Virtually any operation that you can perform interactively can be controlled using an ActiveX Automation-compatible programming language such as Visual Basic, C++, or Perl. Surfer includes GS Scripter - a Visual Basic-compatible programming environment that lets you write, edit, debug, and run scripts. In this way you can automate repetitive tasks, create front ends for running Surfer, or carry out any task that Surfer can do.
Data files can be up to 5 million rows. You can use the Windows Clipboard functions to cut, copy, and paste data within the Surfer worksheet or between applications.
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Import files in DAT, TXT, SLK, XLS, WKx, WRx, CSV, BNA, or BLN formats
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Calculate data statistics
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Perform data transformations using advanced mathematical functions
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Sort data based on primary and secondary columns
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Print the worksheet
Save your data in one of the following formats: XLS, SLK, CSV, TXT, DAT, BLN, and BNA
OBJECT MANAGER
Displays all the objects in the document in an easy-to-use hierarchical tree arrangement. Select objects in the object manager to easily edit, display or hide the,..
Use the object manager to easily access and edit all the objects that appear in your plot window.
Additional Utilities and Features
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Export maps in WMF, CLP, DXF, CGM, TIF, BMP, JPG, TGA, PNG, PCX, DCX, WPG, PCT, SHP formats
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Define default preferences
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Include superscripts, subscripts and Greek or other characters in text
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Compute volumes, planar and surface areas
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Calculate residuals between data and surface
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Easily clip boundaries or posted points to contour map limits
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Display and print subsets of completed maps, complete with subset axes
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