Fast and accurate evaluation of geomagnetic field elements at arbitrary points in space

SUMMARY An algorithm and software are developed for fast and accurate evaluation of the elements of the geomagnetic field represented in high-degree (>720) solid spherical harmonics at many scattered points in the space above the surface of the Earth. The algorithm is based on representation of the geomagnetic field elements in solid ellipsoidal harmonics and application of tensor product needlets. Open source FORTRAN and MATLAB realizations of this algorithm that rely on data from the Enhanced Magnetic Models 2015, 2017 (EMM2015, EMM2017) have been developed and extensively tested. The capabilities of the software are demonstrated on the example of the north, east and down components of the geomagnetic field as well as the derived horizontal intensity, total intensity, inclination and declination. For the range from −417 m under the Earth reference ellipsoid up to 1000 km above it the FORTRAN and MATLAB versions of the software run 465 and 189 times faster than the respective FORTRAN and MATLAB versions of the software using the standard spherical harmonic series method, while the accuracy is less than 1 nT and the memory (RAM) usage is 9 GB.

Estimations of the remainder of spherical harmonic series

An asymptotic estimate is obtained for the error in approximation of functions by partial sums of spherical harmonic expansions. The precise constant in the main term is found and the order of growth of the remainder term is given.