A parallel adaptive barotropic model of the atmosphere

  • Authors:

  • Matthias Läuter;Dörthe Handorf;Natalja Rakowsky;Jörn Behrens;Stephan Frickenhaus;Meike Best;Klaus Dethloff;Wolfgang Hiller

  • Affiliations:

  • Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Physical and Chemical Processes of the Atmosphere, P.O. Box 60 01 49, 14401 Potsdam, Germany;Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Physical and Chemical Processes of the Atmosphere, P.O. Box 60 01 49, 14401 Potsdam, Germany;Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg, Computing Center, Germany;Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany;Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany;Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany;Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Physical and Chemical Processes of the Atmosphere, P.O. Box 60 01 49, 14401 Potsdam, Germany;Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computational Physics
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

The parallel adaptive model PLASMA has been developed for modeling a barotropic atmosphere. This model adapts the computational grid at every time step according to a physical error indicator. Thus, compared to uniform grid experiments the number of grid points is reduced significantly. At the same time, the error increases only slightly, when comparing with uniform grid solutions. For the discretization of the underlying spherical shallow water equations a Lagrange-Galerkin method is used. The unstructured triangular grid is maintained by the grid generator amatos and the large linear systems are solved by the parallel solver interface FoSSI. Experimental convergence is shown by means of steady-state and unsteady analytical solutions. PLASMA yields satisfactory results for quasi standard experiments, that is the Rossby-Haurwitz wave and zonal flows over an isolated mountain.