An accurate and lightweight calculation for the high degree truncation coefficient via asymptotic expansion with applications to spectral gravity forward modeling

Abstract

The truncation coefficient is widely utilized in non-global coverage computations of geophysics and geodesy and is always altitude dependent. As the two commonly used calculation methods for truncation coefficients, i.e., the spectral form and the recursive formula, both suffer from decreasing precision caused by high-altitude, leading to slow convergence for the former and numerical instability recursion for the latter. The asymptotic expansion mathematically converges with increasing degree and can precisely compensate for the shortcomings of the two methods. This study introduces asymptotic expansion to accurately compute the truncation coefficient for the spectral gravity forward modeling to a high degree. The evaluation at the whole altitudes and whole integral radii indicates that the proposed method has the following advantages: (i) The calculation precision increases with increasing degree and is altitude independent; (ii) the accurate calculation can be supported by a double-precision format; and (iii) the calculation can be conducted nearly without extra time cost with increasing degree. Generally, asymptotic expansion is used to calculate the high degree truncation coefficients, while the truncation coefficients at low degrees can be calculated using spectral form or recursive formulas in multiprecision format as a supplement; and the available range of asymptotic expansion is provided in the appendix.