Welcome to the Surface III home page.


Surface III is software for creating contour maps and other displays of three-dimensional, single-valued surfaces. Developed by the Kansas Geological Survey, Surface III is available for Macintosh computers. A version for Microsoft Windows is under development.

The input to Surface III is a text file containing X-Y-Z data points. The X and Y values should describe a Cartesian coordinate system, and the Z should sample a single-valued surface (such as a the surface of the Earth, the thickness of a rock unit, the salinity of an estuary).

From there, the program will create a matrix of rows and columns describing the surface. The user can choose from several gridding methods, including distance-weighted averaging, polynomial fitting, and Universal kriging. Different weighting functions and search methods can be used to create the most accurate grid.

The software can create several kinds of maps:

Maps can be saved to several graphics formats.

Grids can be added, subtracted, multiplied, or divided by one another (grid-to-grid operations). Error analysis functions allow the resulting grid to be compared to the original data set.


You can download a full Macintosh verison of the software. The program is not very stable anymore with newer operating systems. Clicking on the scroll bars will tend to crash the program.

If you'd like a user manual, send a note to

Dana Adkins-Heljeson
Kansas Geological Survey
University of Kansas
1930 Constant Ave.
Lawrence, KS 66047
or send an email to the address below. While we have copies, a user manual will be sent. Online documentation will be added to the web site in the near future.
Kansas Geological Survey
Updated Feb. 2001
Send comments and/or suggestions to webadmin@kgs.ku.edu>