Title: Fourth-order time-stepping for stiff PDEs on the sphere,
Abstract: We present in this paper algorithms for solving stiff PDEs on the unit sphere
with spectral accuracy in space and fourth-order accuracy in time. These are
based on a variant of the double Fourier sphere method in coefficient space
with multiplication matrices that differ from the usual ones, and
implicit-explicit time-stepping schemes. Operating in coefficient space with
these new matrices allows one to use a sparse direct solver, avoids the
coordinate singularity and maintains smoothness at the poles, while
implicit-explicit schemes circumvent severe restrictions on the time-steps due
to stiffness. A comparison is made against exponential integrators and it is
found that implicit-explicit schemes perform best. Implementations in MATLAB
and Chebfun make it possible to compute the solution of many PDEs to high
accuracy in a very convenient fashion.