An Adaptive Nonhydrostatic Atmospheric Dynamical Core Using a Multi-Moment Constrained Finite Volume Method

An adaptive 2 D nonhydrostatic dynamical core is proposed by using the multi-moment constrained finite-volume(MCV) scheme and the Berger-Oliger adaptive mesh refinement(AMR) algorithm. The MCV scheme takes several pointwise values within each computational cell as the predicted variables to build high-order schemes based on single-cell reconstruction. Two types of moments, such as the volume-integrated average(VIA) and point value(PV), are defined as constraint conditions to derive the updating formulations of the unknowns, and the constraint condition on VIA guarantees the rigorous conservation of the proposed model. In this study, the MCV scheme is implemented on a height-based, terrainfollowing grid with variable resolution to solve the nonhydrostatic governing equations of atmospheric dynamics. The AMR grid of Berger-Oliger consists of several groups of blocks with different resolutions, where the MCV model developed on a fixed structured mesh can be used directly. Numerical formulations are designed to implement the coarsefine interpolation and the flux correction for properly exchanging the solution information among different blocks. Widely used benchmark tests are carried out to evaluate the proposed model. The numerical experiments on uniform and AMR grids indicate that the adaptive model has promising potential for improving computational efficiency without losing accuracy.

A 3D Nonhydrostatic Compressible Atmospheric Dynamic Core by Multi-moment Constrained Finite Volume Method

A 3D compressible nonhydrostatic dynamic core based on a three-point multi-moment constrained finite-volume (MCV) method is developed by extending the previous 2D nonhydrostatic atmospheric dynamics to 3D on a terrainfollowing grid. The MCV algorithm defines two types of moments: the point-wise value (PV) and the volume-integrated average (VIA). The unknowns (PV values) are defined at the solution points within each cell and are updated through the time evolution formulations derived from the governing equations. Rigorous numerical conservation is ensured by a constraint on the VIA moment through the flux form formulation. The 3D atmospheric dynamic core reported in this paper is based on a three-point MCV method and has some advantages in comparison with other existing methods, such as uniform third-order accuracy, a compact stencil, and algorithmic simplicity. To check the performance of the 3D nonhydrostatic dynamic core, various benchmark test cases are performed. All the numerical results show that the present dynamic core is very competitive when compared to other existing advanced models, and thus lays the foundation for further developing global atmospheric models in the near future.