This work is focused on the study of unsteady magnetohydrodynamics boundary-layer
flow and heat transfer for a viscous laminar incompressible electrically conducting and rotating
fluid due to a stretching surface embedded in a saturated porous medium with a temperature-dependent viscosity in the presence of a magnetic field and thermal radiation effects. The fluid viscosity is assumed to vary as an inverse linear function of temperature. The Rosseland diffusion approximation is used to describe the radiative heat flux in the energy equation. With appropriate transformations, the unsteady MHD boundary layer equations are reduced to local nonsimilarity equations. Numerical solutions of these equations are obtained by using the Runge–Kutta integration scheme as well as the local nonsimilarity method with second order truncation. Comparisons with previously published work have been conducted and the results are found to be in excellent agreement. A parametric study of the physical parameters is conducted and a representative set of numerical results for the velocity in primary and secondary flows as well as the local skin-friction coefficients and the local Nusselt number are illustrated graphically to show interesting features of Darcy number, viscosity-variation, magnetic field, rotation of the fluid, and conduction radiation parameters