Patterns of convection in rotating spherical shells

Convection in Rotating Spherical Fluid Shells

Convection driven by thermal buoyancy in rotating spherical bodies of fluid has long been recognized as a fundamental process in the understanding of the properties of planets and stars. Since these objects are rotating in general and since their evolution is associated with the transport of heat from their interiors convection influenced by the Coriolis force does indeed play a dominant role i...

“Unusual Properties of Convection and Dynamos in Rotating Spherical Shells”

Hydrothermal convection in moderately thin spherical shells.

Hydrothermal convection of pore water with a temperature-dependent viscosity within a permeable, internally heated, moderately thin spherical shell is investigated by both a perturbation analysis and a direct numerical simulation. The analysis and simulation are mainly focused on a thin spherical shell in that convective instabilities are characterized by the spherical harmonic degree l=6 with ...

Some Unusual Properties of Turbulent Convection and Dynamos in Rotating Spherical Shells

Convection of an electrically conducting fluid in a rotating system represents a basic dynamical process in planetary interiors and in stars. Astrophysicists and geophysicists have long been interested in the mechanisms that govern the convective heat transport and the generation of magnetic fields by convection in those systems. The availability in recent years of large scale computer capaciti...

Computational aspects of a code to study rotating turbulent convection in spherical shells

The coupling of highly turbulent convection with rotation within a full spherical shell geometry, such as in the solar convection zone, can be studied with the new anelastic spherical harmonic (ASH) code developed to exploit massively parallel architectures. Inter-processor transposes are used to ensure data locality in spectral transforms, a sophisticated load balancing algorithm is implemente...