Network design and preprocessing for multi-scale spherical basis function representation

Abstract

Given scattered surface air temperatures observed by a network of weather stations, it is an important problem to estimate the entire temperature field for every location on the globe. Recently, a multi-scale spherical basis function (SBF) representation was proposed by Li (1999) for representing scattered data on the sphere. However, for a successful application of Li (1999)'s method, some practical issues such as network design, bandwidth selection of SBFs and initial coefficients are to be resolved. This paper proposes automatic procedures to design network and to select bandwidths. This paper also considers a preprocessing problem to obtain a stable initial coefficients from scattered data. Experiments with real temperature data demonstrate the promising empirical properties of the proposed approaches.