A community benchmark for 2-D Cartesian compressible convection in the Earth's mantle

Benchmark comparisons are an essential tool to verify the accuracy and validity of computational approaches to mantle convection. Six 2-D Cartesian compressible convection codes are compared for steady-state constant and temperature-dependent viscosity cases as well as time-dependent constant viscosity cases. In general we find good agreement between all codes when comparing average flow characteristics such as Nusselt number and rms velocity. At Rayleigh numbers near 10⁶ and dissipation numbers between 0 and 2, the results differ by approximately 1 per cent. Differences in discretization and use of finite volumes versus finite elements dominate the differences. There is a small systematic difference between the use of the anelastic liquid approximation (ALA) compared to that of the truncated ALA. In determining the onset of time-dependence, there was less agreement between the codes with a spread in the Rayleigh number where the first bifurcation occurs ranging from 7.79 × 10⁵ to 1.05 × 10⁶.