Highly Localized RBF Lagrange Functions for Finite Difference Methods on Spheres

The aim of this paper is to show how rapidly decaying RBF Lagrange functions on the spheres can be used to create effective, stable finite difference methods based on radial basis functions (RBF-FD). For certain classes of PDEs this approach leads to precise convergence estimates for stencils which grow moderately with increasing discretization fineness.