Convective planetary dynamos depend upon secular cooling and internal radioactive decay for generating fluid motions within the core. Some planetary dynamo models also include heat flux variations along the core-mantle boundary (CMB) that modify the dynamo process. Here we study the effects of CMB heat flux variations in two sets of numerical dynamo models. In the first set, the possibility of dynamo action in a stably-stratified, Boussinesq, rotating spherical fluid shell is investigated. In these cases, lateral variations in CMB heat flux can drive significant zonal flows, but no dynamo action develops. In the second set of models, the fluid shell is neutrally-stratified. Dynamo action in these models is controlled by the pattern of CMB heat flux.Our neutrally-stratified models are relevant for studying the limiting effects of strong boundary forcing acting atop a convectively well-mixed state. We study four neutrally-stratified dynamo cases with different spherical harmonic heat flux patterns imposed on the CMB: Y10, Y11, Y20 and Y22. These cases demonstrate that the fundamental symmetries of the dynamo field follow the spatial symmetries of the CMB heat flux pattern. Our results show that convective dynamos are not necessarily killed by boundary-driven thermal winds, a result of interest if Earth's core top is close to adiabatic. A strong Y10 forcing is likely to produce a dynamo with hemispherical magnetic field structure reminiscent of Mars surface magnetization. However, as boundary-modulated convective dynamos produce magnetic fields generally one order of magnitude weaker than homogeneous convective dynamos with an equivalent forcing amplitude, it seems unlikely that this process is at the origin of Mars' regions of strong crustal magnetization. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.

The generation of a magnetic field in numerical simulations of the geodynamo is an intrinsically 3-D and time-dependent phenomenon. The concept of magnetic field lines and the frozen-flux approximation can provide insight into such systems, but a suitable visualization method is required. This paper presents results obtained using the Dynamical Magnetic Field line Imaging (DMFI) technique, which is a representation of magnetic field lines accounting for their local magnetic energy, together with an algorithm for the time evolution of their anchor points. The DMFI illustrations are consistent with previously published dynamo mechanisms, and allow further investigation of spatially and temporally complex systems. We highlight three types of magnetic structures: (i) magnetic cyclones and (ii) magnetic anticyclones are expelled by, but corotate with axial flow vortices; (iii) magnetic upwellings are amplified by stretching and advection within flow upwellings, and show structural similarity with helical plumes found in rotating hydrodynamic experiments. While magnetic anticyclones are responsible for the regeneration of a stable axial dipole, here we show that excursions and reversals of the dipole axis are caused by the emergence of magnetic upwellings, which amplify and transport a generally multipolar magnetic field from the inner to the outer boundary of the models. Geomagnetic observations suggest the presence of magnetic structures similar to those found in our models; thus, we discuss how our results may pertain to Earth's core dynamo processes. In order to make DMFI a standard tool for numerical dynamo studies, a public software package is available upon request to the authors (supplementary material is available at: http://www.ipgp.jussieu.fr/~aubert/ DMFI.html). © 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 RAS.

Numerical simulations of the geodynamo have successfully represented many observable characteristics of the geomagnetic field, yielding insight into the fundamental processes that generate magnetic fields in the Earth's core. Because of limited spatial resolution, however, the diffusivities in numerical dynamo models are much larger than those in the Earth's core, and consequently, questions remain about how realistic these models are. The typical strategy used to address this issue has been to continue to increase the resolution of these quasi-laminar models with increasing computational resources, thus pushing them toward more realistic parameter regimes. We assess which methods are most promising for the next generation of supercomputers, which will offer access to O(106) processor cores for large problems. Here we report performance and accuracy benchmarks from 15 dynamo codes that employ a range of numerical and parallelization methods. Computational performance is assessed on the basis of weak and strong scaling behavior up to 16,384 processor cores. Extrapolations of our weak-scaling results indicate that dynamo codes that employ two-dimensional or three-dimensional domain decompositions can perform efficiently on up to ∼106 processor cores, paving the way for more realistic simulations in the next model generation.