Instabilities in the Shallow-Water System with a Semi-Lagrangian, Time-Centered Discretization

Abstract

Conventional wisdom suggests that the combination of semi-Lagrangian advection and an implicit treatment of gravity wave terms should result in a combined scheme for the shallow-water equations stable for high Courant numbers. This wisdom is well justified by linear analysis of the system about a uniform reference state with constant fluid depth and velocity, but it is only assumed to hold true in more complex scenarios. This work finds that this conventional wisdom no longer holds in more complicated flow regimes, in particular when the background state is given by steady-state flow past topography. Instead, this background state admits a wide range of instabilities that can lead to noise in atmospheric forecasts.