I am not a radar guy, but I am pretty versatile with PLOTs, SHADE_SURFACEs and SHADE_VOLUMEs when I understand the units involved. Now, I presume from your description above that each [ns,nr] couplet maps to a unique lat/lon location. If that is true, then, for every such geographic location you have assigned 'dB' values mapped to the 80 "cells" that are associated with each lat/lon coordinate. I am kind of curious what "cells" are? Are they a 250m x 250m x 250m cubic volume jutting away from or in toward the center of the earth? Probably one doesn't need the answer to that to proceed, but generally speaking surface plots of datasets mapped to 3D spatial coordinates are "isosurfaces". In your case, that would be a surface constructed from a given 'dBZ' value. I guess you might plot many isosurfaces, one for every interesting value of 'dbZ'. Is this what you are looking for? If yes, then you would probably start by experimenting with a study of IDL's SHADE_VOLUME and POLYSHADE procedures. Alternatively, for more easy flexibility in experimenting with how ultimate shaded isosurfaces might look, you might see if you can feed your data into IDL's GUI-based IVOLUME visualization tool, then experiment with the Property sheets of the iVolume you create. James Jones