Publications
A high-order element-based Galerkin Method for the global shallow water equations
The shallow water equations are used as a test for many atmospheric models because the solution mimics the horizontal aspects of atmospheric dynamics while the simplicity of the equations make them useful for numerical experiments. This study describes a high-order element-based Galerkin method for the global shallow water equations using absolute vorticity, divergence, and fluid depth (atmospheric thickness) as the prognostic variables, while the wind field is a diagnostic variable that can be calculated from the stream function and velocity potential (the Laplacians of which are the vorticity and divergence, respectively). The numerical method employed to solve the shallow water system is based on the discontinuous Galerkin and spectral element methods. The discontinuous Galerkin method, which is inherently conservative, is used to solve the equations governing two conservative variables - absolute vorticity and atmospheric thickness (mass). The spectral element method is used to solve the divergence equation and the Poisson equations for the velocity potential and the stream function. Time integration is done with an explicit strong stability-preserving second-order Runge-Kutta scheme and the wind field is updated directly from the vorticity and divergence at each stage, and the computational domain is the cubed sphere. A stable steady-state test is run and convergence results are provided, showing that the method is high-order accurate. Additionally, two tests without analytic solutions are run with comparable results to previous high-resolution runs found in the literature.