Geostrophic Adjustment for Reversibly Staggered Grids

Abstract

A technique is presented for meteorological modeling in which all variables are held on an unstaggered grid, but the winds are transformed to a staggered C grid for the gravity wave calculations. An important feature is the use of a new reversible interpolation procedure for the staggering?unstaggering of the winds. This reversible procedure has excellent dispersion properties for geostrophic adjustment of the linearized shallow-water equations, being generally superior to those of the A, B, and C grids. Its dispersion behavior is generally similar to that of the unstaggered Z grid of Randall, which carries divergence and vorticity as primary variables. The scheme has fewer computational overheads than the Z grid.