Abstract
Some spherical harmonic expressions (SHEs) of gravitational and
geomagnetic field elements will become infinite when computation point
approaches polar regions, as the sine function of the geocentric
co-latitude contained in the denominator tends to be zero. Currently,
this singularity problem has been solved for gravitational field case,
however, it remains unsolved for geomagnetic vectors (GVs) and
geomagnetic gradient tensors (GGTs). The reason is that the latter use
Schmidt semi-normalized associated Legendre function (SNALF), which is
different from fully-normalized associated Legendre function (FNALF)
used in the former. To overcome this singularity problem, we derive new
non-singular expressions of the first- and second-order derivatives of
Schmidt SNALF, and the corresponding two kinds of spherical harmonic
polynomials. When the novel expressions are applied to the traditional
formulae of GVs and GGTs, more practical expressions of GVs and GGTs
with non-singularity are formulated by refining the cases that the order
m equals 0, 1, 2 and other values. Furthermore, to provide flexible
calculation strategies for Schmidt SNALF, we derive four kinds of
recursive formulae, including the standard forward row recursion (SFRR),
the standard forward column recursion (SFCR), the cross degree and order
recursion (CDOR), and the Belikov recursion (BR). Besides, we
demonstrate the effectiveness of the new derived non-singular
expressions of GVs and GGTs and analyze the computation speed and
stability of the four recursive formulae of Schmidt SNALF by extensive
numerical experiments. Results achieve significant improvements in
solving the singularity problem of the SHEs of GVs and GGTs.