An overlapping additive Schwarz preconditioner for interpolation on the unit sphere with spherical radial basis functions

The problem of interpolation of scattered data on the unit sphere has many applications in geodesy and Earth science in which the sphere is taken as a model for the Earth. Spherical radial basis functions provide a convenient tool for constructing the interpolant. However, the underlying linear systems tend to be ill-conditioned. In this paper, we present an additive Schwarz preconditioner for accelerating the solution process. An estimate for the condition number of the preconditioned system will be discussed. Numerical experiments using MAGSAT satellite data will be presented. Crown Copyright (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.