A Multimoment Finite-Volume Shallow-Water Model on the Yin–Yang Overset Spherical Grid

Abstract

Abstract A numerical model for shallow-water equations has been built and tested on the Yin–Yang overset spherical grid. A high-order multimoment finite-volume method is used for the spatial discretization in which two kinds of so-called moments of the physical field [i.e., the volume integrated average (VIA) and the point value (PV)] are treated as the model variables and updated separately in time. In the present model, the PV is computed by the semi-implicit semi-Lagrangian formulation, whereas the VIA is predicted in time via a flux-based finite-volume method and is numerically conserved on each component grid. The concept of including an extra moment (i.e., the volume-integrated value) to enforce the numerical conservativeness provides a general methodology and applies to the existing semi-implicit semi-Lagrangian formulations. Based on both VIA and PV, the high-order interpolation reconstruction can only be done over a single grid cell, which then minimizes the overlapping zone between the Yin and Yang components and effectively reduces the numerical errors introduced in the interpolation required to communicate the data between the two components. The present model completely gets around the singularity and grid convergence in the polar regions of the conventional longitude–latitude grid. Being an issue demanding further investigation, the high-order interpolation across the overlapping region of the Yin–Yang grid in the current model does not rigorously guarantee the numerical conservativeness. Nevertheless, these numerical tests show that the global conservation error in the present model is negligibly small. The model has competitive accuracy and efficiency.