Three-dimensional solutions for the geostrophic flow in the Earth's core

Abstract

In his seminal work, Taylor (1963) argued that the geophysically relevant limit for dynamo action within the outer core is one of negligibly small inertia and viscosity in the magnetohydrodynamic equations. Within this limit, he showed the existence of a necessary condition, now well known as Taylor's constraint, which requires that the cylindrically-averaged Lorentz torque must everywhere vanish; magnetic fields that satisfy this condition are termed Taylor states. Taylor further showed that the requirement of this constraint being continuously satisfied through time prescribes the evolution of the geostrophic flow, the cylindrically-averaged azimuthal flow. We show that Taylor's original prescription for the geostrophic flow, as satisfying a given second order ordinary differential equation, is only valid for a small subset of Taylor states. An incomplete treatment of the boundary conditions renders his equation generally incorrect. Here, by taking proper account of the boundaries, we describe a generalisation of Taylor's method that enables correct evaluation of the instantaneous geostrophic flow for any 3D Taylor state. We present the first full-sphere examples of geostrophic flows driven by non-axisymmetric Taylor states. Although in axisymmetry the geostrophic flow admits a mild logarithmic singularity on the rotation axis, in the fully 3D case we show that this is absent and indeed the geostrophic flow appears to be everywhere regular.