On Near-Diffusion-Free Advection over Spherical Geodesic Grids

Abstract

A forward trajectory advection scheme has been designed for its use in an icosahedral?hexagonal grid model. The scheme has been evaluated with two-dimensional test cases: solid-body rotation and deformational flow; both depict important characteristics of atmospheric flows. The main motivation of this study is to achieve good accuracy without using higher-order interpolations in a numerical advection scheme, so that it may become viable in fine-resolution GCMs. The computation of the error norm shows its gradient as constant and the scheme is approximately first-order accurate. The other interesting feature of this study is that its downstream search algorithm reduces the complexity from O(n2) to O(n).