Local Consistency and Higher-Order Structure of Spherical Interpolation

Abstract

Spherical Interpolation of orDER $n$ (SIDER-$n$) is a recursive high-order interpolation construction for data on the unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^2$, built from repeated spherical linear interpolation (SLERP). This paper gives a local consistency analysis of SIDER for smooth spherical curves sampled at equally spaced parameter values. The analysis is carried out in geodesic normal coordinates, which allows the SIDER recursion to be compared with classical Neville interpolation while retaining the curvature-dependent corrections introduced by SLERP. We first derive local expansions of SLERP and show that SIDER2 has third-order accuracy; its leading error has the same shifted nodal structure as Euclidean quadratic interpolation. We then prove that the adjacent SIDER2 errors entering SIDER3 have a common leading coefficient, so that the SIDER3 recurrence cancels the cubic term and yields fourth-order accuracy. Carrying the expansion one order further gives the corresponding coefficient compatibility for SIDER3 and proves fifth-order accuracy of SIDER4. Finally, we introduce a degree-filtered formal expansion framework for the general SIDER recursion. This framework proves that, for each fixed $n$, SIDER-$n$ preserves the required polynomial degree structure in the normalized stencil variable. Together with the interpolation conditions at the $n+1$ nodes, this yields the local consistency estimate $d_{\mathbb{S}^2}\bigl(γ(θh),P_i^{[n]}(θ;h)\bigr)=O(h^{n+1})$ under the stated smoothness and small-stencil assumptions.