smolar_etal_jcp2015.pdf (4.08 MB)
A finite-volume module for simulating global all-scale atmospheric flows
journal contribution
posted on 2016-03-24, 13:30 authored by Piotr K. Smolarkiewicz, Willem Deconinck, Mats Hamrud, Christian Kühnlein, George Mozdzynski, Joanna SzmelterJoanna Szmelter, Nils P. WediThe paper documents the development of a global nonhydrostatic finite-volume module designed to enhance an established spectral-transform based numerical weather prediction (NWP) model. The module adheres to NWP standards, with formulation of the governing equations based on the classical meteorological latitude-longitude spherical framework. In the horizontal, a bespoke unstructured mesh with finite-volumes built about the reduced Gaussian grid of the existing NWP model circumvents the notorious stiffness in the polar regions of the spherical framework. All dependent variables are co-located, accommodating both spectral-transform and grid-point solutions at the same physical locations. In the vertical, a uniform finite-difference discretisation facilitates the solution of intricate elliptic problems in thin spherical shells, while the pliancy of the physical vertical coordinate is delegated to generalised continuous transformations between computational and physical space. The newly developed module assumes the compressible Euler equations as default, but includes reduced soundproof PDEs as an option. Furthermore, it employs semi-implicit forward-in-time integrators of the governing PDE systems, akin to but more general than those used in the NWP model. The module shares the equal regions parallelisation scheme with the NWP model, with multiple layers of parallelism hybridising MPI tasks and OpenMP threads. The efficacy of the developed nonhydrostatic module is illustrated with benchmarks of idealised global weather.
Funding
This work was supported in part by funding received from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2012/ERC Grant agreement no. 320375).
History
School
- Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering
Published in
Journal of Computational PhysicsVolume
314Pages
287 - 304Citation
SMOLARKIEWICZ, P.K. ... et al, 2016. A finite-volume module for simulating global all-scale atmospheric flows. Journal of Computational Physics, 314, pp. 287-304.Publisher
© ElsevierVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2016-03-08Publication date
2016-03-10Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the Journal of Computational Physics and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcp.2016.03.015.ISSN
0021-9991eISSN
1090-2716Publisher version
Language
- en