Bedmap3 tools for MATLAB

This repo contains MATLAB functions to easily work with Bedmap3 Antarctic Ice Sheet topography data.

Requirements

To use these functions you'll need two things:

1. The bedmap3.nc data file, which can be found here, and
2. Antarctic Mapping Tools for MATLAB.

Documentation

For simple text documentation, type help followed by the name of the function you want to learn about. For example:

help bedmap3_data

Unfortunately, I haven't written exhaustive documentation for these functions, and I'm not sure if or when I'll get around to it. The functions in this repository are modeled after my BedMachine functions, however, so most of the BedMachine examples will work with these Bedmap3 functions.

Function List

• bedmap3_data loads Bedmap3 data into MATLAB.
• bedmap3_interp interpolates Bedmap3 data to any geographic or polar stereographic coordinates.
• bedmap3 creates simple plots of Bedmap3 data.
• bedmap3_profile creates a 2D profile along any given line.

Citation

If you use Bedmap3 data, please cite the Pritchard paper listed below. And if this function is useful for you, please do me a kindness and cite my Antarctic Mapping Tools paper, too.

• Pritchard, H.D., Fretwell, P.T., Fremand, A.C. et al. Bedmap3 updated ice bed, surface and thickness gridded datasets for Antarctica. Sci Data 12, 414 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04672-y
• Greene, C. A., Gwyther, D. E., & Blankenship, D. D. Antarctic Mapping Tools for Matlab. Computers & Geosciences. 104 (2017) pp.151-157. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cageo.2016.08.003