Geodesic metrics for RBF approximation of some physical quantities measured on sphere

Abstract

The radial basis function (RBF) approximation is a rapidly developing field of mathematics. In the paper, we are concerned with the measurement of scalar physical quantities at nodes on sphere in the 3D Euclidean space and the spherical RBF interpolation of the data acquired. We employ a multiquadric as the radial basis function and the corresponding trend is a polynomial of degree 2 considered in Cartesian coordinates. Attention is paid to geodesic metrics that define the distance of two points on a sphere. The choice of a particular geodesic metric function is an important part of the construction of interpolation formula.

We show the existence of an interpolation formula of the type considered. The approximation formulas of this type can be useful in the interpretation of measurements of various physical quantities. We present an example concerned with the sampling of anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility having extensive applications in geosciences and demonstrate the advantages and drawbacks of the formulas chosen, in particular the strong dependence of interpolation results on condition number of the matrix of the system considered and on round-off errors in general.