Numerical computation of spherical harmonics of arbitrary degree and order by extending exponent of floating point numbers: II first-, second-, and third-order derivatives

Abstract

We confirm that the first-, second-, and third-order derivatives of fully-normalized Legendre polynomial (LP) and associated Legendre function (ALF) of arbitrary degree and order can be correctly evaluated by means of non-singular fixed-degree formulas (Bosch in Phys Chem Earth 25:655–659, 2000) in the ordinary IEEE754 arithmetic when the values of fully-normalized LP and ALF are obtained without underflow problems, for e.g., using the extended range arithmetic we recently developed (Fukushima in J Geod 86:271–285, 2012). Also, we notice the same correctness for the popular but singular fixed-order formulas unless (1) the order of differentiation is greater than the order of harmonics and (2) the point of evaluation is close to the poles. The new formulation using the fixed-order formulas runs at a negligible extra computational time, i.e., 3–5 % increase in computational time per single ALF when compared with the standard algorithm without the exponent extension. This enables a practical computation of low-order derivatives of spherical harmonics of arbitrary degree and order.