Radiation fields in radiative transfer: spherical-wavelet representation

The spherical wavelet based on the lifting scheme is introduced for adaptive discrete-ordinate sampling of the radiation fields, particularly, in the radiative transfer computation using iterative schemes. The lifting scheme for wavelet transform is described from an implementation point of view, including the construction of hierarchical geodesic grids on the sphere and wavelet constructions. In addition, we compare the method with the conventional spherical harmonics, numerically investigating the transformation error and efficiency. The transformation matrices are built in the least-squares sense. The results demonstrate the feasibility of using spherical wavelets as an adaptive discrete-ordinate sampling method at the cost of O(N), where N is the number of significant coefficients. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.