Spherical Slepian functions and the polar gap in geodesy

The estimation of potential fields such as the gravitational or magnetic potential at the surface of a spherical planet from noisy observations taken at an altitude over an incomplete portion of the globe is a classic example of an ill-posed inverse problem. Here we show that the geodetic estimation problem has deep-seated connections to Slepian’s spatiospectral localization problem on the sphere, which amounts to finding bandlimited spherical functions whose energy is optimally concentrated in some closed portion of the unit sphere. This allows us to formulate an alternative solution to the traditional damped least-squares spherical harmonic approach in geodesy, whereby the source field is now expanded in a truncated Slepian function basis set. We discuss the relative performance of both methods with regard to standard statistical measures as bias, variance and mean-square error, and pay special attention to the algorithmic efficiency of computing the Slepian functions on the region complementary to the axisymmetric polar gap characteristic of satellite surveys. The ease, speed, and accuracy of this new method makes the use of spherical Slepian functions in earth and planetary geodesy practical.