Two‐dimensional continuation of potential fields is commonly achieved by employing a continuation operator which consists of a number of coefficients operating upon uniformly gridded field data. To obtain accurate results, the size of the operator has to be quite large. This not only requires a lot of computational work, but also causes a considerable loss of information due to the reduced size of the field obtained after continuation. Small‐size “equivalent” operators were designed which are free from these drawbacks but yield accurate results. In order to demonstrate the efficiency of these operators, a potential field was continued upward by using 31×31 Tsuboi coefficients. This required 961 multiplications for computing the continued field at each grid point. When procedure was repeated using the equivalent operator, the number of multiplications required for each grid point was reduced to 15, the size of the resulting map was much larger, but the results in both cases were practically identical in accuracy. Frequency characteristics of the equivalent operators and the continuation of data very close to the boundary of the field map are discussed.
Nearly equivalent operators