Why do I have negative dB values after converting PSD output to dB?

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I'm using acoustic data which I am in the process of producing spectrograms for. At the moment I am working with one .wav file at a time. I load in the file, apply a calibration correction, perform the spectrogram function and then plot the output of this using surf. In the plotting process, I convert the PSD to decibels. My understanding is that once I do this, all of my values should be positive, is that the case? As, when I check the output of the data, I get a negative value as the minimum value -35.0339. Can anyone explain why this would be??
directory=('Y:\SoundTrap\Noises\Noises_5103_SepOct'); %folder where wav files are
%Load in files of interest:
wavfile='5103.190901150236.wav';
%Get full filename:
wavfilename=fullfile(directory, wavfile);
%Input variables for audioread:
fs=144000;
tlo=4.0; %select only part of data and so remove cal.tone
thi=119.0;
nlo=fs*tlo; %multiply fs by tlo to get starting point
nup=fs*thi; %do the same for end point
%Input variables for spectrogram:
nfft=fs;
window=fs;
overlap=window/2;
%Get calibration info:
SN=strsplit(wavfile, '.');
SN1=char(SN(1));
serialNo=str2num(SN1);
cal=176.5;
%Read in file and apply calibration:
[xbit,fs]=audioread(wavfilename, [nlo nup]); %read in wav
xbit=detrend(xbit); %remove DC offset
cal=power(10,cal/20); %calculate calibration value
calxbit=xbit*cal; %apply calibration
%Perform FFT and plot:
f1=figure; %produces empty figure to plot in
[cal,F,T,P] = spectrogram(calxbit,window,overlap,nfft,fs,'yaxis');
%P is a matrix representing PSD of each segment
surf(T,F,10*log10(P),'edgecolor','none');
%plots output of spectrogram
%10log10 converts PSD output to dB
%Look at dB values:
dbvals=10*log10(P);
mindb=min(dbvals,[],'all');
maxdb=max(dbvals,[],'all');
  4 Comments
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 3 Nov 2019
If there is a segment which is fairly quiet (little noise) then it seems to me the PSD for the segment could be small. PSD of roughly 0.00032 would give you the -35 dB
Louise Wilson
Louise Wilson on 3 Nov 2019
This is great to know, thank you. I just wanted to be sure it wasn't an error. Thanks!

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R2019a

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