Geodetic calculus with block-averages observations on the sphere

The calculus of spherical harmonic representation of fields of geodetic interest is often performed by applying integral formulas to block-averaged quantities. Due to the dependence of the block areas on latitude, it is difficult to perform a rigorous computation; in this paper the effects of approximations related to the loss of orthogonality in the discretization and averaging procedures are numerically studied; a simple numerical approach to improve the efficiency of the estimates is presented.