Willi Freeden, J. Fröhhlich, R. Brand

• The paper discusses the approximation of scattered data on the sphere which is one of the major tasks in geomathematics. Starting from the discretization of singular integrals on the sphere the authors devise a simple approximation method that employs locally supported spherical polynomials and does not require equidistributed grids. It is the basis for a hierarchical approximation algorithm using differently scaled basis functions, adaptivity and error control. The method is applied to two examples one of which is a digital terrain model of Australia.