Christian Gerhards

Christian Gerhards

This paper provides an overview on tools from potential theory on the sphere and some applications in geoscience.

Laurent Baratchart, Christian Gerhards

In Geomagnetism it is of interest to separate the Earth's core magnetic field from the crustal magnetic field. However, measurements by satellites can only sense the sum of the two contributions. In practice, the measured magnetic field is expanded in spherical harmonics and separation into crust and core contribution is achieved empirically, by a sharp cutoff in the spectral domain. In this paper, we derive a mathematical setup in which the two contributions are modeled by harmonic potentials $Φ_0$ and $Φ_1$ generated on two different spheres $\mathbb{S}_{R_0}$ (crust) and $\mathbb{S}_{R_1}$ (core) with radii $R_1<R_0$. Although it is not possible in general to recover $Φ_0$ and $Φ_1$ knowing their superposition $Φ_0+Φ_1$ on a sphere $\mathbb{S}_{R_2}$ with radius $R_2>R_0$, we show that it becomes possible if the magnetization $\mathbf{m}$ generating $Φ_0$ is localized in a strict subregion of $\mathbb{S}_{R_0}$. Beyond unique recoverability, we show in this case how to numerically reconstruct characteristic features of $Φ_0$ (e.g., spherical harmonic Fourier coefficients). An alternative way of phrasing the results is that knowledge of $\mathbf{m}$ on a nonempty open subset of $\mathbb{S}_{R_0}$ allows one to perform separation.

Christian Gerhards

Reconstructing magnetizations from measurements of the generated magnetic potential is generally non-unique. The non-uniqueness still remains if one restricts the magnetization to those induced by an ambient magnetic dipole field (i.e., the magnetization is described by a scalar susceptibility and the dipole direction). Here, we investigate the situation under the additional constraint that the susceptibility is either spatially localized in a subregion of the sphere or that it is band-limited. If the dipole direction is known, then the susceptibility is uniquely determined under the spatial localization constraint while it is only determined up to a constant under the the assumption of band-limitedness. If the dipole direction is not known, uniqueness is lost again. However, we show that all dipole directions that could possibly generate the measured magnetic potential need to be zeros of a certain polynomial which can be computed from the given potential. We provide examples of non-uniqueness of the dipole direction and examples on how to find admissible candidates for the dipole direction under the spatial localization constraint.

C. Gerhards, S. Pereverzyev, P. Tkachenko

In many geoscientific applications, multiple noisy observations of different origin need to be combined to improve the reconstruction of a common underlying quantity. This naturally leads to multi-parameter models for which adequate strategies are required to choose a set of 'good' parameters. In this study, we present a fairly general method for choosing such a set of parameters, provided that discrete direct, but maybe noisy, measurements of the underlying quantity are included in the observation data, and the inner product of the reconstruction space can be accurately estimated by the inner product of the discretization space. Then the proposed parameter choice method gives an accuracy that only by an absolute constant multiplier differs from the noise level and the accuracy of the best approximant in the reconstruction and in the discretization spaces.