Welcome to the Introduction to Geodynamic Modelling course!

The Helsinki University Geodynamics Group is offering a one-week short course titled “Introduction to geodynamic modelling” for master’s/PhD students and interested researchers.

Course goals

• Understand the fundamental physical equations solved in numerical geodynamic models, how they work, and how they affect numerical experiments
• Learn how to convert the main equations used to model lithospheric deformation into simple programs
• Develop a background understanding of geodynamics that allows you to properly understand the behavior of geodynamic numerical models

Course information

• General info
  • Course meetings
  • Instructors
  • Course website
  • Course completion methods
  • Suggested background studies
• Learning goals
• Grading
  • General grading breakdown
• Resources
• License and terms of usage
  • Instructional materials
  • Code snippets / software
• Past versions of this course

Day 1

• Course overview
  • Let’s get to know one another
  • Practical matters
  • Computer stuff and course website
  • Course goals and learning objectives
  • Schedule
  • Any questions?
• Key physical processes and concepts
• Solving equations
• Basic elements of Python
  • Sources
  • About this document
  • Exercise - Getting to know lists
• Functions
  • Sources
  • What is a function?
  • Anatomy of a function
  • Calling functions
• Introduction to NumPy
  • Introducing NumPy
  • Useful functions
• for loops
  • Sources
  • Basics of for loops
• Conditional statements
  • Sources
  • Basics of conditional statements

Day 2

• Introduction to finite differences
  • Taylor series approach; accuracy
  • Do
  • Do
  • Calculating the error
  • Do
  • Do
• Finite differences for heat equation
  • Do
  • Do
• Stability of the heat equation FD approximation
• Heat diffusion + advection
  • Do

Day 3

• Testing your code and benchmarking
  • Sources of error (revisited)
  • Calculating error
  • How do you know when your solution is “correct”?
  • Stability for advection problems
• FD for Stokes equation
  • Channel flow
• Solution strategy for the channel flow
  • Do
• Calculating strain rates
  • Do
• Velocity boundary conditions

Day 4

• Cluster computing
  • Performance of geodynamic models
  • Performance of parallel programs
  • Do
• Putting it all together
  • Processes to consider
  • Interactions between processes/materials
  • General structure of a thermomechanical code
• Marker-in-cell technique
• Numerical diffusion
  • Getting started
  • Setting up the problem
  • Calculating the solution and plotting the results
  • What to do?
• Introduction to DOUAR

Day 5

• Helpful command line tools
  • Navigating the filesystem
  • Running DOUAR jobs
• Project overview
  • Course project
  • The paper
  • Due date and credit points
  • Any questions?

Technical instructions

• Using geo-hpcc cluster
  • Connecting from Windows
  • Connecting from Linux
  • Running DOUAR models

Indices and tables

• Index
• Module Index
• Search Page