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Abstract:
Spherical Slepian functions (or ‘Slepian functions’) are mathematical functions which can be used to decompose potential fields, as represented by spherical harmonics, into smaller regions covering part of a spherical surface. This allows a spatio-spectral trade-off between aliasing of the signal at the boundary edges while constraining it within a region of interest. While Slepian functions have previously been applied to crustal magnetic data, this work further applies Slepian functions to flows on the core-mantle boundary. There are two main reasons for restricting flow models to certain parts of the core surface. Firstly, we have reason to believe that different dynamics operate in different parts of the core while, secondly, the modelled flow is ambiguous over certain parts of the surface. Spherical Slepian functions retain many of the advantages of our usual flow description, concerning for example the boundary conditions it must satisfy, and allowing easy calculation of the power
