sphereCLAW: Hyperbolic PDEs on the surface of a sphere

Written by James A. Rossmanith

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Description: This code is described in detail in the following paper:

J.A. Rossmanith, A wave propagation method for hyperbolic systems on the sphere,
Journal of Computational Physics, Volume 213, pp. 629--658, 2006.
sphereCLAW is an extension of the CLAWMAN code developed by Bale and Rossmanith, which is in turn an extension of the CLAWPACK (version 4.3) code developed by LeVeque. The code uses a high-resolution shock-capturing finite volume method for solving various hyperbolic PDEs that are confined to the surface of a sphere. Examples include the advection and shallow water equations, which are important in large-scale atmospheric modeling. Another example is the shallow water MHD system, which is important in solar physics for modeling the solar tachocline. The numerical grid used on the sphere is the six-grid cubed sphere approach. Below is a picture of the basic grid.

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Procedure for downloading sphereCLAW

• Dowload CLAWPACK (version 4.3) software package: CLAWPACK (version 4.3)
  
• Get instructions for downloading and compiling sphereCLAW: Instructions_sphereCLAW.pdf
  
• Download sphereCLAW directory tarball: sphereCLAW.tar.gz (latest version: 1/1/2007)
  

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Examples included in this code

• advection/solid_body_rot: solid body rotation of a discontinuous ``target'' profile
• shallow_water/rossby_haurwitz: propagating Rossby-Haurwitz wave
• shallow_water/mountain: flow over an isolated, compactly supported mountain
• shallow_water/jet_inviscid: Kelvin-Helmoltz roll-up of a mid-latitude jet (inviscid case)
• shallow_water/jet_viscous: Kelvin-Helmoltz roll-up of a mid-latitude jet (viscous case)
• shallow_water/dambreak: axisymmetric dambreak problem for the shallow water equations on a sphere
• shallow_water_mhd/dambreak: axisymmetric dambreak problem for the shallow water magnetohydrodynamic equations on a sphere

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