A 3D Surface Plot in Stata

A three-dimensional surface plot draws a wireframe plot for three variables. The X and Y variables indicate the traditional two dimensions (up/down and left/right), and the Z variable contains the third dimension of depth (backwards/forwards). For this example we are showing sea surface temperature data according to location as given in latitude (X variable) and longitude (Y variable). The temperature is the third dimension in this graph.

To create a 3D surface plot in Stata you first need to download the surface command from the SSC, which you can do in Stata with the following command:

ssc install surface

To generate this graph in Stata, use the following commands:

sysuse surface, clear
surface latitude longitude temperature, orient(xzy) nobox wcolor(midblue)