@acer I'm using Maple 15 (yeah, I know)

1. What I'm hoping for is an ouline of the globe visible through the contours

2. Instead of the contours being drawn flat on the sphere I'd like the higher numbers to represent a height above the sphere, the colours representing height.

 I know there's a zhue COLOR setting but I wondered if there's an RHUE?

@acer I have a couple more questions for you:

1. Is it possible to make the countour plot transparent so that a globe can be plotted underneath?

2. Is also possible to make the contourplot vary by the value given + the radius of the sphere (in other words to produce hills and valleys where the colour varies by distance from the origin?

@acer That is my problem - this stuff is either undocumented or badly documented. How did you find out about this stuff?

@Carl Love 

Firstly, thank you for your timely assistance in this matter. This is the beginning of a journey for me to parse a lot of data through Maple ready for analysis.

Clearly I am waaaay behind in my knowledge of how Maple plotting and mapping works, and I'm going to spend some time working out what commands like

map[inplace]

and

[1, 2] = COLOR(HUE, ListTools:-Flatten(convert(G, listlist))[]) 

does.

The data comes from satellite measurements and so there are gaps in the coverage near the equator, hence the streaks. The break in the meridian is a feature of the data that I need to get back to the curators on.

Can I ask you where and how you learned so much information on Maple and plotting? It seems that the help files are difficult to parse and have poor examples. There must be a much better source of information in a book or other resource somewhere?

@Markiyan Hirnyk I have put my testdata up in my reply to Carl Love if you want to have a go...

@Carl Love My test data is attached.

The format is latitude (degrees), longitude (degrees) and value (arbitrary units)

The value for "no data" is -1.26765e+30 

testdata.txt

This is what my data should look like (in a contour plot on a sphere)

But how do I create this in Maple?

@Kitonum Thanks for that. I feel like I need to exorcise all of my bad habits from using Mathcad.

@Carl Love Thank you. Big help

@DSkoog Thanks for that.

What I got was each month plotted as a separate series, not exactly what I wanted.

It looks like I'll have to save some money to upgrade to the latest version to get Maple to plot a time series from a columnar matrix of months.

Maybe there's a function which takes a matrix and makes it into vector by transposing each row into a column, I don't know. 

@DSkoog Thank you for your reply. This means I have to upgrade from Maple 15, doesn't it? Is there no way to produce this without using that library?

@mehdi jafari Its not a general question about importing, its a specific question about how to create a time series from an array of columnar data

@Mac Dude The question is NOT "How do I import an array from Excel?", its "How to I get an array with the monthly data in columns to be converted into a time series?"

@Mac Dude The answer is usually in the manual but the question is where? If people just want to tell me where to look for the answer then that's fine because I don't want to simply get the answer but get better at where to find the answer.

@acer Just did my data using Reshape() and FlipDimension(). Both took less than a tenth of a second!

I knew there must be a quick way if I just asked.

The other thing is that reading your code increases my Maple knowledge exponentially. Thanks for that.