Q. T. Le Gia

Q. T. Le Gia, H. N. Mhaskar

The purpose of this paper is to construct universal, auto--adaptive, localized, linear, polynomial (-valued) operators based on scattered data on the (hyper--)sphere $\SS^q$ ($q\ge 2$). The approximation and localization properties of our operators are studied theoretically in deterministic as well as probabilistic settings. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate their superiority over traditional least squares and discrete Fourier projection polynomial approximations. An essential ingredient in our construction is the construction of quadrature formulas based on scattered data, exact for integrating spherical polynomials of (moderately) high degree. Our formulas are based on scattered sites; i.e., in contrast to such well known formulas as Driscoll--Healy formulas, we need not choose the location of the sites in any particular manner. While the previous attempts to construct such formulas have yielded formulas exact for spherical polynomials of degree at most 18, we are able to construct formulas exact for spherical polynomials of degree 178.

M. Ganesh, Q. T. Le Gia, I. H. Sloan

In this work, we describe, analyze, and implement a pseudospectral quadrature method for a global computer modeling of the incompressible surface Navier-Stokes equations on the rotating unit sphere. Our spectrally accurate numerical error analysis is based on the Gevrey regularity of the solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations on the sphere. The scheme is designed for convenient application of fast evaluation techniques such as the fast Fourier transform (FFT), and the implementation is based on a stable adaptive time discretization.

Q. T. Le Gia, Ian H. Sloan, Andrew J. Wathen

This paper proposes a new preconditioning scheme for a linear system with a saddle-point structure arising from a hybrid approximation scheme on the sphere, an approximation scheme that combines (local) spherical radial basis functions and (global) spherical polynomials. Making use of a recently derived inf-sup condition [13] and the Brezzi stability and convergence theorem for this approximation scheme, we show that the linear system can be optimally preconditioned with a suitable block-diagonal preconditioner. Numerical experiments with a non-uniform distribution of data points support the theoretical conclusions.

Q. T. Le Gia, William McLean

We propose a method to construct numerical solutions of parabolic equations on the unit sphere. The time discretization uses Laplace transforms and quadrature. The spatial approximation of the solution employs radial basis functions restricted to the sphere. The method allows us to construct high accuracy numerical solutions in parallel. We establish $L_2$ error estimates for smooth and nonsmooth initial data, and describe some numerical experiments.