Andrew J. Wathen

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.