Locally supported rational spline wavelets on a sphere

In this paper we construct certain continuous piecewise rational wavelets on arbitrary spherical triangulations, giving explicit expressions of these wavelets. Our wavelets have small support, a fact which is very important in working with large amounts of data, since the algorithms for decomposition, compression and reconstruction deal with sparse matrices. We also give a quasi-interpolant associated to a given triangulation and study the approximation error. Some numerical examples are given to illustrate the efficiency of our wavelets.