Michael Schreiner

• By the use of locally supported basis functions for spherical spline interpolation the applicability of this approximation method is spread out since the resulting interpolation matrix is sparse and thus efficient solvers can be used. In this paper we study locally supported kernels in detail. Investigations on the Legendre coefficients allow a characterization of the underlying Hilbert space structure. We show now spherical spline interpolation with polynomial precision can be managed with locally supported kernels, thus giving the possibility to combine approximation techniques based on spherical harmonic expansions with those based on locally supported kernels.