# Simple spherical harmonic analyses¶

This tutorial demonstrates how to analyse global data on the sphere using spherical harmonic functions. In contrast to the introductory notebooks that make use of the pyshtools classes SHCoeffs and SHGrid, these examples will instead make use of python and fortran wrapped functions.

In [1]:
from __future__ import print_function # only necessary if using Python 2.x
%matplotlib inline

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import pyshtools

In [2]:
pyshtools.utils.figstyle(rel_width=0.75)
%config InlineBackend.figure_format = 'retina'  # if you are not using a retina display, comment this line


In this example, we will use the topography of Earth that is provided in the example directory. We can read this file using shread(), and then expand it onto a grid using MakeGridDH():

In [3]:
clm, lmax = pyshtools.shio.shread('../ExampleDataFiles/srtmp300.msl')
topo = pyshtools.expand.MakeGridDH(clm, sampling=2)

fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 1)
ax.imshow(topo, extent=(0, 360, -90, 90))
ax.set(xlabel='Longitude', ylabel='Latitude', yticks=np.arange(-90,120,30), xticks=np.arange(0,390,30))
ax.minorticks_on()


Using the grid topo, we will first demonstrate how to calculate the power spectrum, and second, how to perform simple filtering operations.

## The power spectrum¶

The power spectrum of a function describes how the variance of the function is distributed as a function of spherical harmonic degree. Concentration of power (or energy) in spherical harmonics with a particular wavelength can give hints about the origin of the feature. First, let's expand the gridded data into spherical harmonics using the function SHExpandDH():

In [4]:
coeffs = pyshtools.expand.SHExpandDH(topo, sampling=2)


The "power spectrum" can be calculated using different conventions. The default in pyshtools is to calculate the total power of all angular orders as a function of spherical harmonic degee, which corresponds to the option unit='per_l'. The power per degree l is somewhat equivalent to the power at a given wavenumber magnitude |k| in 2D Fourier analyses. The power spectrum is computed using the function spectrum():

In [5]:
power_per_l = pyshtools.spectralanalysis.spectrum(coeffs)
degrees = np.arange(coeffs.shape[1])

fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 1)
ax.plot(degrees, power_per_l)
ax.set(yscale='log', xscale='log', xlabel='Spherical harmonic degree', ylabel='Power')
ax.grid()


The average power per coefficient as a function of spherical harmonic degree can be calculated by setting the parameter unit equal to 'per_lm'. This is simply the power per degree divided by (2l+1), and is analogous to the power per wavenumber $k_x$ and $k_y$ in 2D Fourier analyses.

In [6]:
power_per_lm = pyshtools.spectralanalysis.spectrum(coeffs, unit='per_lm')

fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 1)
ax.plot(degrees, power_per_lm)
ax.set(xscale='log', yscale='log', xlabel='Spherical harmonic degree', ylabel='Power')
ax.grid()


Finally, the contribution to the total power from all angular orders over an infinitessimal logarithmic degree band dlog_a(l) can be calculated by setting unit='per_dlogl'. In this case, the contrubution in the band dlog_a(l) is spectrum(l, 'per_dlogl')*dlog_a(l), where a is the base, and where spectrum(l, 'per_dlogl) is equal to spectrum(l, 'per_l')*l*log(a). This power spectrum is useful to analyse dominant scales.

In [7]:
power_per_dlogl = pyshtools.spectralanalysis.spectrum(coeffs, unit='per_dlogl', base=2.)

fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 1)
ax.plot(degrees, power_per_dlogl)
ax.set_yscale('log', basey=2)
ax.set_xscale('log', basex=2)
ax.set(ylabel='Power', xlabel='Spherical harmonic degree')
ax.grid()


## Simple Filtering¶

A global dataset can be filtered isotropically by multiplying the spherical harmonic coefficients by a degree-dependent function. We demonstrate this by setting the coefficients greater or equal to degree 8 equal to zero.

In [8]:
coeffs_filtered = coeffs.copy()
lmax = 8
coeffs_filtered[:, lmax:, :] = 0.

topo_filtered = pyshtools.expand.MakeGridDH(coeffs_filtered, sampling=2)


Next, we bandpass filter the data to retain only spherical harmonic coefficients between degrees 8 and 20.

In [9]:
coeffs_filtered2 = coeffs.copy()
lmin, lmax = 8, 20
coeffs_filtered2[:, :lmin, :] = 0.
coeffs_filtered2[:, lmax:, :] = 0.

topo_filtered2 = pyshtools.expand.MakeGridDH(coeffs_filtered2, sampling=2)


Finally, let's plot the two filtered data sets:

In [10]:
fig, (row1, row2) = plt.subplots(2, 1)
row1.imshow(topo_filtered, extent=(0, 360, -90, 90))
row1.set(xlabel='Longitude', ylabel='Latitude', title='l = 0 - 7', yticks=np.arange(-90,135,45), xticks=np.arange(0,405,45))
row2.imshow(topo_filtered2, extent=(0, 360, -90, 90))
row2.set(xlabel='Longitude', ylabel='Latitude', title='l = 8 - 19', yticks=np.arange(-90,135,45), xticks=np.arange(0,405,45))
fig.tight_layout()