This book is the first to be devoted to the theory and applications of spherical (radial) basis functions (SBFs), which is rapidly emerging as one of the most promising techniques for solving problems where approximations are needed on the surface of a sphere. The aim of the book is to provide enough theoretical and practical details for the reader to be able to implement the SBF methods to solve real world problems. The authors stress the close connection between the theory of SBFs and that of the more well-known family of radial basis functions (RBFs), which are well-established tools...