Navier–Stokes spectral solver in a sphere

The paper presents the first implementation of a primitive variable spectral method for calculating viscous flows inside a sphere. A variational formulation of the Navier–Stokes equations is adopted using a fractional-step time discretization with the classical second-order backward difference scheme combined with explicit extrapolation of the nonlinear term. The resulting scalar and vector elliptic equations are solved by means of the direct spectral solvers developed recently by the authors. The spectral matrices for radial operators are characterized by a minimal sparsity – diagonal stiffness and tridiagonal mass matrix. Closed-form expressions of their nonzero elements are provided here for the first time, showing that the condition number of the relevant matrices grows as the second power of the truncation order. A new spectral elliptic solver for the velocity unknown in spherical coordinates is also described that includes implicitly the Coriolis force in a rotating frame, but requires a minimal coupling between the modal velocity components in the Fourier space. The numerical tests confirm that the proposed method achieves spectral accuracy and ensures infinite differentiability to all orders of the numerical solution, by construction. These results indicate that the new primitive variable spectral solver is an effective alternative to the spectral method recently proposed by Kida and Nakayama, where the velocity field is represented in terms of poloidal and toroidal functions.