EART 290C – NUMERICAL TOOLBOX FOR PLANETARY SCIENCES

Winter 2017 Class Notes 

 

Email Prof. Nimmo (fnimmo@es.ucsc.edu) if you have problems accessing the files below

  

Timing/Location: Mon/Weds from 11:50 to 1:15 in E&MS D236

 

Course Goals: To provide a set of simple techniques to carry out quantitative modeling of problems frequently encountered in planetary sciences. The course will consist of a mixture of analytical and numerical descriptions and is for the most part designed to be platform-independent. More details are in the syllabus.

  

Texts:  I like Numerical Recipes (Press et al.) for their descriptions of many numerical techniques (I use the Fortran version)

 

          (Approximate) Course Outline

 

          Week 1 (9 Jan): Heat conduction (diffusion). Notes.

                             Problem Set (due Tues 17th Jan)      (answers to analytical problems)

                             The standard cookbook of analytical solutions is in Carslaw and Jaeger, Conduction of Heat in Solids, Oxford Science Publications, 1959.

 

          Weeks 2-3 (18 Jan): Fourier transform. Notes.

                             Problem Set (due Mon 30th Jan) (answers)

                             Fortran code for fourier operations can be downloaded here (tar file).

                             Gubbins, Time series analysis and inverse theory for geophysicists, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004, is a good introduction.

                            

          Weeks 4-5 (30 Jan): Spherical harmonics. Notes. More notes.

                             Problem Set (due Mon 13th Feb) and associated files: simple.dat, synthetic_europa_l3-360-2.dat, plmbar.f

                             Answers to problem set.

                             Blakely, Potential theory in gravity and magnetic applications, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996, is good.

                             SHTOOLS is a useful set of routines, located at https://shtools.oca.eu/shtools/

 

          Weeks 6-7 (13 Feb): Markov Chain Monte Carlo. Notes.

                             Problem Set (due Mon 20th Feb) and associated files: ellips_0.txt, ellips_1.txt, ellips_2.txt

                             Kruschke, Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, Academic Press, 2015 is very useful.

                             A very useful and well-documented implementation is emcee, located at http://dan.iel.fm/emcee/current/

                             My commented emcee implementation for the lunar Love number

                              

          Week 8 (27 Feb): Tides and shape. Notes.

                             Problem Set (due Mon 13th March)

                             Two-layer elastic analytical solution by Harrison (1963): paper, fortran implementation

                             Murray and Dermott, Solar System Dynamics, CUP, 1999, chapters 4 and 5.