On numerical solution of the shallow water equations with chemical reactions on icosahedral geodesic grid

• Authors: Janusz A. Pudykiewicz
• Venue: Journal of Computational Physics
• Year: 2011

The shallow water equations coupled to the set of reaction-advection-diffusion equations are discretized on a geodesic icosahedral mesh using the finite volume technique. The method of solution of this coupled system is based on the principle of semi-discretization. The algorithm is mass conserving and stable for advection with the Courant numbers up to 2.7. The important part of the methodology is the optimization of the node positions in the icosahedral grid. It is shown that a slight adjustment of the mesh is instrumental in improving the accuracy of the numerical approximation. The convergence of the approximation of the differential operators is evaluated and compared to the data published in the literature. Numerical tests performed with the shallow water solver include two advection experiments, steady and unsteady zonal balanced flow, mountain flow, and the Rossby wave. The mountain flow and the Rossby wave cases are used to test the transport properties of the method in the case of both passive and reactive scalar fields. The investigation of essential numerical characteristics of the method is concluded by the simulation of an unstable zonal jet. The numerical simulation is performed using the set of shallow water equations without dissipation as well as with the viscosity term added to the momentum equation. Results show that the behavior of the model is consistent with both the literature published on the subject and the general empirical evidence.