Applied geoscientific modeling

Keywords: Équations différentielles – Méthodes numériques – Géodynamique
Prerequisites: Pratiques numériques de géosciences

This course aims at enabling students to design analytical and numerical models for a wide range of problems in the geosciences. Topics will include:

• Basic “philosophy” of modeling.
• Dimensional analysis, scaling laws, dimensionless numbers.
• Analytical approaches to standard problems (differential equations / PDEs).
• Discretization methods: finite difference & finite element.
• Numerical solutions to linear and non-linear systems, iterative methods.

We will emphasize practical aspects of geoscientific modeling, i.e., the design of relevant analytical and numerical models to address a particular problem or explain a given dataset. Evaluation will be based upon the completion and presentation of a modeling project.