The article contains an analysis of the shallow elastic spherical shell on a rectangular plan, reinforced with ribs along its contour, under the uniformly distributed load. The problem is solved numerically with the variational-difference method, considering the geometric nonlineaity and the shear deformations of the shell and the ribs. As a result, the dependencies of the critical load on the shell stiffness and the ribs stiffness are obtained.

Keywords: shallow spherical shell, ribbed shell, stability, bending stiffness, geometrical nonlinearity, variational-difference method, critical load