Convection in a Rapidly Rotating Spherical Shell: Newton's Method Using Implicit Coriolis Integration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Newton's method-based implicit Coriolis integration technique for simulating rapidly rotating geophysical flows in spherical shells, significantly improving stability and computational efficiency at low Ekman numbers.

Contribution

The authors developed an implicit Coriolis force treatment combined with Newton's method for steady-state solutions, enabling faster simulations of geophysical flows at low Ekman numbers.

Findings

Implicit treatment reduces computational cost by up to 20 times at Ekman numbers of 10^{-5}.

Flow structures become more axially independent as Ekman number decreases.

The method accurately captures rotating wave branches and bifurcation behaviors.

Abstract

Geophysical flows are characterized by rapid rotation. Simulating these flows requires small timesteps to achieve stability and accuracy. Numerical stability can be greatly improved by the implicit integration of the terms that are most responsible for destabilizing the numerical scheme. We have implemented an implicit treatment of the Coriolis force in a rotating spherical shell driven by a radial thermal gradient. We modified the resulting timestepping code to carry out steady-state solving via Newton's method, which has no timestepping error. The implicit terms have the effect of preconditioning the linear systems, which can then be rapidly solved by a matrix-free Krylov method. We computed the branches of rotating waves with azimuthal wavenumbers ranging from 4 to 12. As the Ekman number (the non-dimensionalized inverse rotation rate) decreases, the flows are increasingly axially independent and localized near the inner cylinder, in keeping with well-known theoretical predictions and previous experimental and numerical results. The advantage of the implicit over the explicit treatment also increases dramatically with decreasing Ekman numbers, reducing the cost of computation by as much as a factor of 20 for Ekman numbers of order of $10^{-5}$. We carried out continuation for both the Rayleigh and Ekman numbers and obtained interesting branches in which the drift velocity remained unchanged between pairs of saddle-node bifurcations.