Calculating the RMS of an array

[Aisling]

Right, this may be really simple but I am seriously struggling with it!

I have an array of data which shows a map of Sweden (the sea is masked out so all the values over the sea are set to 0). I need to calculate the root mean square of only the values not equal to 0 in my array, but I have no idea how to do this in Matlab. I can calculate the RMS of the whole array, but it comes out far too good (due to all the zeros over the sea!).

So if I have a 70x40 array how do I only pick out the values not equal to zero and take the RMS of them?

Help would be much appreciated.
A

[MATLABdude]

What you'd need to do is to first reshape your matrix into a single vector

>> nonzeros = reshape(map, 1, prod(size(map)))

Then, you'd need to find the zeros and delete them (you couldn't do this without reshaping because you can't have a matrix with rows and or columns that weren't all the same length).

>> nonzeros(find(nonzeros==0))=[]

...And now you can take the RMS of the non-zero entries.


EDIT: I suppose you could also just count the number of non-zero entries and divide by that number instead of the number of elements in the array. But then you're wasting cycles on determining the RMS of the zero elements.

>> nonzero = prod(size(find(map~=0)))

[Aisling]

Thank you...that worked like a treat. I'm quite new to Matlab and am still struggling with even the simplest of things!

A.