In this paper, we investigate the finite volume method (FVM) for a distributed-order space-fractional advection–diffusion (AD) equation. The mid-point quadrature rule is used to approximate the distributed-order equation by a multi-term fractional model. Next, the transformed multi-term fractional equation is solved by discretizing in space by the finite volume method and in time using the Crank–Nicolson scheme. We use a novel technique to deal with the convection term, by which the Riesz fractional derivative of order 0 <γ<1 is transformed into a fractional integral fo...