Mathematical and numerical analysis of a nonlinear diffusive climate energy balance model

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to carry out the mathematical and numerical analysis of a two-dimensional nonlinear parabolic problem on a compact Riemannian manifold without boundary, which arises in the energy balance for the averaged surface temperature. We use a possibly quasi-linear diffusion operator suggested by P. H. Stone in 1972. The modelling of the Budyko discontinuous coalbedo is formulated in terms of a bounded maximal monotone graph of R(2). The existence of global solutions is proved by applying a fixed point argument. Since the uniqueness of solutions may fail for the case of discontinuous coalbedo, we introduce the notion of non-degenerate solutions and show that the problem has at most one solution in this class of functions. The numerical analysis is carried out for the special case of a spherical Earth and uses quasi-uniform spherical triangles as finite elements. We study the existence, uniqueness and stability of the approximate solutions. We also show results of some long-term numerical experiments.