The authors of [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 110 (2013), pp. 6634–6639] proposed sparse Fourier domain approximation of solutions to multiscale PDE problems by soft thresholding. We show here that the method enjoys a number of desirable numerical and analytic properties, including convergence for linear PDEs and a modified equation resulting from the sparse approximation. We also extend the meth...