A FINITE VOLUME SEMI-IMPLICIT SEMI-LAGRANGIAN SCHEME ON THE YIN-YANG MESH

Abstract:

Designed for grid point systems, the traditional semi-Lagrangian semi-implicit scheme is not mass-conserving and can lead to significant solution errors. In the present study, a finite-volume semi-Lagrangian semi-implicit scheme (hereafter “FVSLSI”) is designed for the Yin-Yang mesh and tested in a barotropic shallow water model in the spherical coordinate system. Three test cases, i.e. the advection of a solid body, a steady state nonlinear zonal geostrophic flow and the deformation flow, are simulated to compare the performance of the FVSLSI with that of the traditional semi-Lagrangian scheme (hereafter “SL”) from perspectives of shape preservation, mass conservation, normalized bias, and convergence rate. Results indicate that the FVSLSI performs better than the SL in mass conservation and shape preservation. The bias by the FVSLSI is smaller than that by the SL, while the rate of convergence by the FVSLSI is larger than that by the SL. The FVSLSI also allows large time step. Therefore, the FVSLSI is suggested to be distributed to communities that are developing atmospheric/oceanic models.