calculate conservative interpolation of two vectors in matlab - matlab

Question

G'day
Firstly, apologies for poor wording - I'm at a bit of a loss of how to describe this problem. I'm trying to calculate the conservative interpolation between two different vertical coordinate systems.
I have a vector of ocean transport values Ts, that describe the amount of transport at different depth values S. These depths are unevenly spaced (and size(S) is equal to size(Ts)+1 as the values in S are the depths at the top and bottom over which the transport value applies). I want to interpolate(/project?) this onto a vector of regularly spaced depths Z, where each new transport value Tz is formed from the values of Ts but weighted by the amount of overlap.
I've drawn a picture of what I mean (sorry for the bad quality webcam picture) I want to go from Ts1,Ts2.Ts3...TsN (bottom lines) to Tz1,Tz2,...TzN (top lines). The locations in the x direction for these are s0,s1,s2,...sN and z0,z1,z2,...zN. An example of the 'weighted overlap' would be:
Tz1 = a/(s1-s0) Ts1 + b/(s2-s1) Ts2 + c/(s3-s2) Ts3
where a, b and c are shown in the image as the length of overlap.
Some more details:
Example of z and s follow:
z = 0:5:720;
s = [222.69;...
223.74
225.67
228.53
232.39
237.35
243.56
251.17
260.41
271.5
284.73
300.42
318.9
340.54
365.69
394.69
427.78
465.11
506.62
551.98
600.54
651.2];
Note that I'm free to define z, but not s. Typically, z will be bigger than s (i.e. the smallest value in z will be smaller than in s, while the largest value in z will be larger than in s).
Help or tips greatly appreciated. Cheers,
Dave

Answer 1

I don't think there is an easy solution, as stated in the comments. I'll give it a go though :
One hypothesis first : We assume z0>s0 in order for your problem to be defined.
The idea (for your example) would be to get to the array below :
1 (s1-z0) s1-s0 Ts1
1 (s2-s1) s2-s1 Ts2
1 (z1-s2) s3-s2 Ts3
2 (s3-z1) s3-s2 Ts3
2 (z2-s3) s4-s3 Ts4
3 (z3-z2) s4-s3 Ts4
......
Then we would be able to compute, for each row : column1*column3/column2 and then use accumarray to sum the results with respect to the indexes in the first column.
Now the hardest part is to get this array :
Suppose you have :
A Nx1 vectors Ts
2 (N+1)x1 vectors s and z, with z(1)>s(1).
Vectsz=sort([s(2:end);z]); % Sorted vector of s and z values
In your case this vector should look like :
z0
s1
s2
z1
s3
z2
z3
...
The first column will serve as a subscript to apply accumarray, so we'll want it to increase each time there is a z value in our vector Vectsz
First=interp1(z,1:length(z),Vectsz,'previous');
Second=[diff(Vectsz);0]; % Padded with a 0 to keep the right size
Temp=diff(s);
Third=interp1(s(1:end-1),Temp,Vectsz,'previous');
This will just repeat the diff value everytime you have a z value in your vector Vectsz.
The last column is built exactly like the third one
Fourth=interp1(s(1:end-1),Ts,Vectsz,'previous');
Now that the array is built, a call to accumarray is enough to get the final result :
Res=accumarray(First,Second.*Fourth./Third);
EDIT : There is actually no need for the use of interp1 with the previous option :
Vectsz=sort([s(2:end);z]);
First=cumsum(ismember(Vectsz,z));
Second=[diff(Vectsz);0];
idx=cumsum(ismember(Vectsz,s(2:end)))+1;
Diffs=[diff(s);0];
Third=Diffs(idx);
Fourth=Ts(idx);
Res=accumarray(First,Second.*Fourth./Third);