New Relations Among Associated Legendre Functions and Spherical Harmonics

Several new relations among associated Legendre functions (ALFs) are derived, most of which relate a product of an ALF with trigonometric functions to a weighted summation over ALFs, where the weights only depend on the degree and order of the ALF. These relations are, for example, useful in applica...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Claessens, Sten
Format: Journal Article
Published: Springer - Verlag 2005
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/19446
_version_ 1848750036274380800
author Claessens, Sten
author_facet Claessens, Sten
author_sort Claessens, Sten
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description Several new relations among associated Legendre functions (ALFs) are derived, most of which relate a product of an ALF with trigonometric functions to a weighted summation over ALFs, where the weights only depend on the degree and order of the ALF. These relations are, for example, useful in applications such as the computation of geopotential coefficients and computation of ellipsoidal corrections in geoid modelling. The main relations are presented in both their unnormalised and fully normalised ($4\pi$-normalised) form. Several approaches to compute the weights involved are discussed, and it is shown that the relations can also be applied in the case of first- and second-order derivatives of ALFs, which may be of use in analysis of satellite gradiometry data. Finally, the derived relations are combined to provide new identities among ALFs, which contain no dependency on the colatitudinal coordinate other than that in the ALFs themselves.
first_indexed 2025-11-14T07:30:27Z
format Journal Article
id curtin-20.500.11937-19446
institution Curtin University Malaysia
institution_category Local University
last_indexed 2025-11-14T07:30:27Z
publishDate 2005
publisher Springer - Verlag
recordtype eprints
repository_type Digital Repository
spelling curtin-20.500.11937-194462018-10-02T04:31:44Z New Relations Among Associated Legendre Functions and Spherical Harmonics Claessens, Sten Spherical Harmonics Associated Legendre Functions Several new relations among associated Legendre functions (ALFs) are derived, most of which relate a product of an ALF with trigonometric functions to a weighted summation over ALFs, where the weights only depend on the degree and order of the ALF. These relations are, for example, useful in applications such as the computation of geopotential coefficients and computation of ellipsoidal corrections in geoid modelling. The main relations are presented in both their unnormalised and fully normalised ($4\pi$-normalised) form. Several approaches to compute the weights involved are discussed, and it is shown that the relations can also be applied in the case of first- and second-order derivatives of ALFs, which may be of use in analysis of satellite gradiometry data. Finally, the derived relations are combined to provide new identities among ALFs, which contain no dependency on the colatitudinal coordinate other than that in the ALFs themselves. 2005 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/19446 10.1007/s00190-005-0483-9 Springer - Verlag fulltext
spellingShingle Spherical Harmonics
Associated Legendre Functions
Claessens, Sten
New Relations Among Associated Legendre Functions and Spherical Harmonics
title New Relations Among Associated Legendre Functions and Spherical Harmonics
title_full New Relations Among Associated Legendre Functions and Spherical Harmonics
title_fullStr New Relations Among Associated Legendre Functions and Spherical Harmonics
title_full_unstemmed New Relations Among Associated Legendre Functions and Spherical Harmonics
title_short New Relations Among Associated Legendre Functions and Spherical Harmonics
title_sort new relations among associated legendre functions and spherical harmonics
topic Spherical Harmonics
Associated Legendre Functions
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/19446