Convection in a spherical shell under rapid rotation: numerical simulations

Abstract: A numerical method for solving the buoyancy-driven magneto-convection equations in a rapidly rotating spherical shell is presented. The method is implemented through a FORTRAN 90 program, based on a FORTRAN 66 code written by Hollerbach [International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids, 32 (2000)] and partially translated in FORTRAN 90 by Riquier. The program uses the pseudo-spectral method and computes velocity as well as temperature fields in a rapidly rotating spherical shell. The code has been validated through comparisons with previous studies and parallelized using OpenMP. Comparisons with Hollerbach's method have been carried out and showed improvements in stability.