Geodetic Applications of Wavelets: Proposals and Simple Numerical Experiments

The aim of this paper is to treat at a review level some topics of the theory of wavelets that are relevant for some geodetic applications, to further specify some proposals already formulated by one of the authors (1994) and to enforce the proposals by mean of some numerical experiments. The papers about the geodetic applications of wavelets are quite numerous nowadays (see e.g. Barthelmes at al. 1994 and Ballani 1994), therefore it is worthwhile to better specify our present field of interest. Several authors developed efficient numerical algorithms based on the wavelet representation for the computation of linear operators in L 2 (Beylkin et al. 1991, Beylkin 1992, Alpert 1993). The application of these techniques for the computation of linear operators in physical geodesy is investigated in this paper. We only consider operators in planar approximation in order to rely on well established mathematical tools.