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This review article reports current activities and recent progress on constructive approximation and numerical analysis in physical geodesy. The paper focuses on two major topics of interest, namely trial systems for purposes of global and local approximation and methods for adequate geodetic application. A fundamental tool is an uncertainty principle, which gives appropriate bounds for the quantification of space and momentum localization of trial functions. The essential outcome is a better understanding of constructive approximation in terms of radial basis functions such as splines and wavelets.
Two possible substitutes of the Fourier transform in geopotential determination are windowed Fourier transform (WFT) and wavelet transform (WT). In this paper we introduce harmonic WFT and WT and show how it can be used to give information about the geopotential simultaneously in the space domain and the frequency (angular momentum) domain. The counterparts of the inverse Fourier transform are derived, which allow us to reconstruct the geopotential from its WFT and WT, respectively. Moreover, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition that an otherwise arbitrary function of space and frequency has to satisfy to be the WFT or WT of a potential. Finally, least - squares approximation and minimum norm (i.e. least - energy) representation, which will play a particular role in geodetic applications of both WFT and WT, are discussed in more detail.