Abstract. In this paper we wish to present a new class of tight frames on the sphere. These frames have excellent pointwise localization and approximation properties. These properties are based on pointwise localization of kernels arising in the spectral calculus for certain self-adjoint operators, and on a positive-weight quadrature formula for the sphere that the authors have recently developed. Improved bounds on the weights in this formula are another by-product of our analysis.

A discrete system of almost exponentially localized elements (needlets) on the n-dimensional unit sphere S n is constructed. It shown that the needlet system can be used for decomposition of Besov and Triebel-Lizorkin spaces on the sphere. As an application of Besov spaces on S n , a Jackson estimate for nonlinear m-term approximation from the needlet system is obtained.

Abstract. Geodetic and meteorological data, collected via satellites for example, are genuinely scattered and not confined to any special set of points. Even so, known quadrature formulas used in numerically computing integrals involving such data have had restrictions either on the sites (points) used or, more significantly, on the number of sites required. Here, for the unit sphere embedded in R q , we obtain quadrature formulas that are exact for spherical harmonics of a fixed order, have nonnegative weights, and are based on function values at scattered sites. To be exact, these formulas require only a number of sites comparable to the dimension of the space. As a part of the proof, we derive L 1 -Marcinkiewicz-Zygmund inequalities for such sites.

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Abstract. In this paper we discuss Sobolev bounds on functions that vanish at scattered points in a bounded, Lipschitz domain that satisfies a uniform interior cone condition. The Sobolev spaces involved may have fractional as well as integer order. We then apply these results to obtain estimates for continuous and discrete least squares surface fits via radial basis functions (RBFs). These estimates include situations in which the target function does not belong to the native space of the RBF.