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A high‐order fully explicit flux‐form semi‐Lagrangian shallow‐water model
Author(s) -
Ullrich Paul Aaron,
Lauritzen Peter Hjort,
Jablonowski Christiane
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
international journal for numerical methods in fluids
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.938
H-Index - 112
eISSN - 1097-0363
pISSN - 0271-2091
DOI - 10.1002/fld.3887
Subject(s) - pointwise , advection , shallow water equations , mathematics , finite volume method , conservation of mass , state variable , consistency (knowledge bases) , grid , test case , mathematical analysis , geometry , mechanics , physics , statistics , regression analysis , thermodynamics
SUMMARY A new approach is proposed for constructing a fully explicit third‐order mass‐conservative semi‐Lagrangian scheme for simulating the shallow‐water equations on an equiangular cubed‐sphere grid. State variables are staggered with velocity components stored pointwise at nodal points and mass variables stored as element averages. In order to advance the state variables in time, we first apply an explicit multi‐step time‐stepping scheme to update the velocity components and then use a semi‐Lagrangian advection scheme to update the height field and tracer variables. This procedure is chosen to ensure consistency between dry air mass and tracers, which is particularly important in many atmospheric chemistry applications. The resulting scheme is shown to be competitive with many existing numerical methods on a suite of standard test cases and demonstrates slightly improved performance over other high‐order finite‐volume models. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.