MATLAB® Recipes for Earth Sciences, Fifth Edition

A Practical MATLAB Companion for Earth Science Data

Earth science data rarely arrives neatly packaged. It comes as scattered measurements, satellite scenes, stratigraphic logs, or time series with gaps and outliers. MATLAB® Recipes for Earth Sciences is written for readers who need to turn that raw material into interpretable results without wading through unnecessary theory. Martin H. Trauth builds the Fifth Edition around short, adaptable recipes: step-by-step MATLAB scripts and functions that demonstrate common data analysis tasks and can be modified for your own projects.

The book keeps theoretical background deliberately minimal, then shows each method in action with worked examples. That structure makes it useful both for readers who want a structured introduction and for experienced researchers who need to solve a specific problem quickly.

From Basic Statistics to Advanced Spatial Methods

Across its chapters, the book moves from foundational sample-and-population concepts into univariate and bivariate statistics, time-series analysis, signal processing, geostatistics, image processing, and multivariate methods. Later chapters address circular and spherical data—an area relevant to structural geology, paleomagnetics, and microstructural studies.

• Univariate and bivariate statistics — distributions, hypothesis testing, error analysis, resampling, and cross-validation.
• Time-series and signal processing — aliasing, Nyquist frequency, spectral analysis, wavelet methods, jump detection, and recurrence plots.
• Spatial and image data — digital elevation models, satellite imagery, vegetation indices, and geostatistical workflows.
• Multivariate analysis — principal component analysis, log-ratio transformations for compositional data, and large data-set handling.
• Circular and spherical statistics — orientation data, grain shapes, and quartz c-axis analysis.

What the Fifth Edition Adds

This edition is revised and updated throughout. New or substantially expanded material includes error analysis, aligning stratigraphic sequences, calculating vegetation indices, log-ratio transformations to address the closed-sum problem in compositional data, and graphical representation and statistics for spherical data. The MATLAB discussion now covers floating-point numbers, string and table arrays, the datastore family for importing mixed data, the Live Editor, and App Designer.

Many examples reflect changes in satellite data and digital terrain model data sets, so the recipes stay aligned with current practice.

Who Will Find It Useful

The preface addresses undergraduate and postgraduate students, doctoral candidates, post-doctoral researchers, and professionals in the earth sciences. Because most methods are introduced with simple code before MATLAB-specific functions appear, users of free alternatives to MATLAB can also follow the underlying logic. The recipes were developed using MATLAB 9.9 Release R2020b, but most should work with earlier releases.

Readers can work through the book sequentially or jump straight to the method that matches their current problem. Numerous figures allow the text to be followed even when MATLAB is not open, though access to MATLAB is recommended for executing the recipes and adapting them to new data.

How the Book Is Organized

The opening chapter connects data types and research questions to the methods that follow. A tutorial-style MATLAB introduction comes next, aimed at earth scientists who are new to the software or need to refresh specific skills. Subsequent chapters are paired by theme—statistics, time series, spatial data and images—so readers can see how related techniques fit together. The final chapters expand into multivariate and directional data analysis.

Supplementary electronic material is described in the book as containing recipes with the MATLAB commands featured in the text and the example data sets. This makes the book a bridge between reading and doing: you can inspect the code, run it, and then modify it for your own measurements.

A Working Reference for Quantitative Earth Science

MATLAB® Recipes for Earth Sciences, Fifth Edition, is not a software manual in isolation and not a pure statistics text. It is a working reference for earth scientists who want to apply quantitative methods with clarity and reproducibility. Whether you are analyzing a single data set for a thesis chapter or building a longer-term analytical workflow, the recipe-based approach offers a practical starting point.