Towards safe and effective high-order Legendre transforms with applications to FFTs for the 2-sphere (Q1431332)

Recently, \textit{J. R. Driscoll} and \textit{D. M. Healy jun.} [Adv. Appl. Math. 15, No.~2, 202--250 (1994; Zbl 0801.65141)] and \textit{D. M. Healy jun.}, \textit{D. N. Rockmore, P. J. Kostelec}, and \textit{S.Moore} [J. Fourier Anal. Appl. 9, No.~4, 341--385 (2003; Zbl 1037.65136)] proposed a fast \({\mathcal O}(N\log^2N)\) algorithm for computing the spherical harmonic expansion of a function sampled at \(N\) points on the sphere. This algorithm suffers from numerical instabilities which grow with the order of the associated Legendre functions in the transform. Based on the study of the error mechanism for these higher-order cases the authors suggest a new approach to high-order discrete Legendre transforms by introducing an alternative factorisation of the associated Legendre functions in place of that used in the basic algorithm. The authors describe the incorporation of the new Legendre decomposition in the basic algorithm and demonstrate its improved numerical stability by experiments.