Fast computation of sine/cosine series coefficients of associated Legendre function of arbitrary high degree and order

Abstract

In order to accelerate the spherical/spheroidal harmonic synthesis of any function, we developed a new recursive method to compute the sine/cosine series coefficient of the 4π fully- and Schmidt quasi-normalized associated Legendre functions. The key of the method is a set of increasing-degree/order mixed-wavenumber two to four-term recurrence formulas to compute the diagonal terms. They are used in preparing the seed values of the decreasing-order fixed-degree, and fixed-wavenumber two- and three-term recurrence formulas, which are obtained by modifying the classic relations. The new method is accurate and capable to deal with an arbitrary high degree/ order/wavenumber. Also, it runs significantly faster than the previous method of ours utilizing the Wigner d function, say around 20 times more when the maximum degree exceeds 1,000.

Keywords

• associated legendre function
• fourier series expansion
• recurrence formula
• spherical harmonic expansion
• spheroidal harmonic expansion