Because physical phenomena on Earth's surface occur on many different length
scales, it makes sense when seeking an efficient approximation to start with a
crude global approximation, and then make a sequence of corrections on finer
and finer scales. It also makes sense eventually to seek fine scale features
locally, rather than globally. In the present work, we start with a global
multiscale radial basis function (RBF) approximation, based on a sequence of
point sets with decreasing mesh norm, and a sequence of (spherical) radial
basis functions with proportionally decreasing scale centered at the points. We
then prove that we can "zoom in" on a region of particular interest, by
carrying out further stages of multiscale refinement on a local region. The
proof combines multiscale techniques for the sphere from Le Gia, Sloan and
Wendland, SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 48 (2010) and Applied Comp. Harm. Anal. 32
(2012), with those for a bounded region in Rd from Wendland, Numer.
Math. 116 (2012). The zooming in process can be continued indefinitely, since
the condition numbers of matrices at the different scales remain bounded. A
numerical example illustrates the process