A comparison of high-order time integrators for thermal convection in rotating spherical shells (Q2638300)

A numerical study of several time integration methods for solving the three-dimensional Boussinesq thermal convection equations in rotating spherical shells is presented. Implicit and semi-implicit time integration techniques based on backward differentiation and extrapolation formulae are considered. The use of Krylov techniques allows the implicit treatment of the Coriolis term with low storage requirements. The codes are validated with a known benchmark, and their efficiency is studied. The results show that high-order methods, especially those with time step and order control, can be used not only for computing high-accurate solutions, but also for obtaining the usual accuracy along with the increase of the efficiency with respect to the time integration.