Comparison of finite difference- And pseudospectral methods for convective flow over a sphere

Abstract

For modeling convective flows over a sphere or within a spherical shell, pseudospectral (PS) methods are in general far more cost-effective than finite difference- (or finite element) methods. This study confirms this, and proceeds by comparing a Fourier-PS implementation (based on a longitude-latitude grid) with one using spherical harmonics. For similar resolutions, these are found to be of similar accuracy. However, the former is computationally about ten times faster. Copyright 1997 by the American Geophysical Union.