Unfortunately, MATLAB doesn't have the facility to create either split axes to show such a gap or to condense a section of an axes that doesn't contain data, nor to draw on an axes anything other than against the input x,y locations.
Those facilities would be nice to have, indeed, but for now you've got to work around it in one way or another.
There are two choices I see, first rescale the longitudinal data to be continuous--that's the following illustrative code:
FIRST METHOD
To create a representation such as you're looking for here on a single axes would require creating the x data to be continuous from [-130 +130] across +/-180.
Do this by linear mapping and joining the two subsections from [-180 -130] and [180 130]
bW=polyfit(xW,[xW(1) 0],1)
bE=polyfit(xE,[0 xE(2)],1)
NOTA BENE: the slope is same, just opposite sign of intercept so can set one from the other if desired rather than recompute.
So, now if given an input set of coordinates, to patch them together would be
x=[polyval(bW,[-130:-10:-180]) polyval(bE,[180:-10:130])]
x =
-130.0000 -104.0000 -78.0000 -52.0000 -26.0000 0 0.0000 26.0000 52.0000 78.0000 104.0000 130.0000
which gives a continuous vector across the discontinuity.
You then use xticklabels to write the desired actual coordinates in place of the tick values.
SECOND METHOD
The alternate way to create the plot would be to use two independent axes drawn side by side -- this is doable, but tends to get complicated. Well, let's see what we can do here quickly...
hAx(2)=axes('Position',posn+[posn(1)+posn(3)*2/3 0 0 0]);
One sees you now do have to axes that look like they are one with the exception of the xlim both go from the default [0 1] range. Now you can plot the W and E portions of the data into the respective axes; (I've not tried, you may be able to ignore and clipping will take care of the other data at the RH limits of the two axes.)
When ready to plot set
hAx(2).YAxis.Visible='off';
so the extra y axis isn't visible. The 'box' property cannot be used here; if desired, will have to be drawn as xline, yline objects on the two axes or the opposite axis tick marks will show up again.
Then, for the tick labels, the last trick is
x=[-130:-25:-180; 180:-25:130];
xstr=cellstr(num2str(x(1,:).')); xstr(end)={''};
xstr=cellstr(num2str(x(2,:).'));
