Matlab geoglobe Earth visualizations

Matlab can directly create 3-D interactive plots of the Earth. An alternative is to export KML and use Google Earth to plot 3-D data with rendering of the Earth’s surface.

The plotting backend is WebGL, which is also used in uifigure. Matlab WebGL uses the GPU, including non-discrete GPUs built into the CPU as used in basic laptop PCs.

geoplot3 and geoglobe can generate a wide variety of intuitive, appealing and animated 3D plots.

fg = uifigure;
geoglobe(fg)

In Python, plotting data over a 3-D rendered Earth surface requires additional libraries like Mayavi or IPyParaView that serve as a frontend to VTK.