James Shaw

James Shaw, Hilary Weller, John Methven et al.

Including terrain in atmospheric models gives rise to mesh distortions near the lower boundary that can degrade accuracy and challenge the stability of transport schemes. Multidimensional transport schemes avoid splitting errors on distorted, arbitrary meshes, and method-of-lines schemes have low computational cost because they perform reconstructions at fixed points. This paper presents a multidimensional method-of-lines finite volume transport scheme, "cubicFit", which is designed to be numerically stable on arbitrary meshes. Stability conditions derived from a von Neumann stability analysis are imposed during model initialisation to obtain stability and improve accuracy in distorted regions of the mesh, and near steeply-sloping lower boundaries. Reconstruction calculations depend upon the mesh only, needing just one vector multiply per face per time-stage irrespective of the velocity field. The cubicFit scheme is evaluated using three, idealised numerical tests. The first is a variant of a standard horizontal transport test on severely distorted terrain-following meshes. The second is a new test case that assesses accuracy near the ground by transporting a tracer at the lower boundary over steep terrain on terrain-following meshes, cut-cell meshes, and new, slanted-cell meshes that do not suffer from severe time-step constraints associated with cut cells. The third, standard test deforms a tracer in a vortical flow on hexagonal-icosahedral meshes and cubed-sphere meshes. In all tests, cubicFit is stable and largely insensitive to mesh distortions, and cubicFit results are more accurate than those obtained using a multidimensional linear upwind transport scheme. The cubicFit scheme is second-order convergent regardless of mesh distortions.

Yumeng Chen, Hilary Weller, Stephen Pring et al.

Dimensionally split advection schemes are attractive for atmospheric modelling due to their efficiency and accuracy in each spatial dimension. Accurate long time-steps can be achieved without significant cost using the flux-form semi-Lagrangian technique. The dimensionally split scheme used here is constructed from the one-dimensional Piecewise Parabolic Method and extended to two dimensions using COSMIC splitting. The dimensionally split scheme is compared with a genuinely multi-dimensional, method of lines scheme with implicit time-stepping which is stable for large Courant numbers. Two-dimensional advection test cases on Cartesian planes are proposed that avoid the complexities of a spherical domain or multi-panel meshes. These are solid body rotation, horizontal advection over orography and deformational flow. The test cases use distorted meshes either to represent sloping terrain or to mimic the distortions of a cubed sphere. Such mesh distortions are expected to accentuate the errors associated with dimension splitting, however, the dimensionally split scheme is very accurate on orthogonal meshes and accuracy decreases only a little in the presence of large mesh distortions. The dimensionally split scheme also loses some accuracy when long time-steps are used. The multi-dimensional scheme is almost entirely insensitive to mesh distortions and asymptotes to second-order accuracy at high resolution. As is expected for implicit time-stepping, phase errors occur when using long time-steps but the spatially well resolved features are advected at the correct speed and the multi-dimensional scheme is always stable. An estimate of computational cost reveals that the implicit scheme is the most expensive, particularly for large Courant numbers. If the multi-dimensional scheme is used instead with explicit time-stepping, the cost becomes similar to the dimensionally split scheme.