Highly localized RBF Lagrange functions for finite difference methods on spheres

The aim of this paper is to show how rapidly decaying RBF Lagrange functions on the sphere can be used to create a numerically feasible, stable finite difference method based on radial basis functions (an RBF-FD-like method). For certain classes of PDEs this approach leads to rigorous convergence estimates for stencils which grow moderately with increasing discretization fineness.