A hierarchical basis preconditioner for the biharmonic equation on the sphere

^** Email: jan.maes{at}cs.kuleuven.be In this paper, we propose a natural way to extend a bivariatePowell–Sabin (PS) B-spline basis on a planar polygonaldomain to a PS B-spline basis defined on a subset of the unitsphere in [graphic: see PDF] . The spherical basis inherits many properties of the bivariatebasis such as local support, the partition of unity propertyand stability. This allows us to construct a C¹ continuous hierarchicalbasis on the sphere that is suitable for preconditioning fourth-orderelliptic problems on the sphere. We show that the stiffnessmatrix relative to this hierarchical basis has a logarithmicallygrowing condition number, which is a suboptimal result comparedto standard multigrid methods. Nevertheless, this is a hugeimprovement over solving the discretized system without preconditioning,and its extreme simplicity contributes to its attractiveness.Furthermore, we briefly describe a way to stabilize the hierarchicalbasis with the aid of the lifting scheme. This yields a waveletbasis on the sphere for which we find a uniformly well-conditionedand (quasi-) sparse stiffness matrix.