Book Image

R Graphs Cookbook Second Edition

Book Image

R Graphs Cookbook Second Edition

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (22 chapters)
R Graphs Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating contour plots


In this recipe, we will learn how to make contour plots to visualize topographical data, such as the terrain near a mountain or a volcano.

Getting ready

We are only using the base graphics functions for this recipe. So, just open up the R prompt and type the following code. We will use the inbuilt volcano dataset, so we need not load anything.

How to do it...

Let's first make a default contour plot with volcano:

contour(x=10*1:nrow(volcano), y=10*1:ncol(volcano), z=volcano,
xlab="Metres West",ylab="Metres North", 
main="Topography of Maunga Whau Volcano")

How it works...

We used the contour() base graphics library function to make the graph.

The x and y arguments specify the locations of the grid at which the height values (z) are specified. The volcano dataset contains topographic information on a 10 x 10 m grid, so we set the x and y grid arguments to 10 times the index numbers of rows and columns, respectively.

The contour data, z, is provided by the volcano dataset in a...