Dynamico-FE: A Hydrostatic Dynamical Core using Higher-Order Structure-Preserving Finite Elements
Abstract
It is well known that the inviscid, adiabatic equations of atmospheric motion constitute a non-canonical Hamiltonian system, and therefore posses many important conserved quantities such as as mass, potential vorticity and total energy. However, until recently, only a few discretization schemes possessed similar conserved quantities. Fortunately, a general approach to deriving such schemes was developed under the framework of Hamiltonian methods, and over the past decade, there has been a great deal of work on the development of mimetic and conservative numerical schemes for atmospheric dynamical cores using these techniques. An important example is Dynamico, which conserves mass, potential vorticity and total energy; and possesses additional mimetic properties such as a curl-free pressure gradient that does not produce spurious vorticity. Unfortunately, the underlying finite-difference discretization scheme used in Dynamico has been shown to be inconsistent on general grids. To resolve these accuracy issues, a scheme based on mimetic finite elements has been developed that achieves higher-order accuracy while retaining the structure-preserving properties of the existing discretization. This presentation will discuss the new dynamical core, termed Dynamico-FE, along with a more general discussion on mimetic methods as used in atmospheric science.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFM.A31A0006E
- Keywords:
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- 3336 Numerical approximations and analyses;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSESDE: 3337 Global climate models;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES