Conservation with moving meshes over orography

Abstract

Adaptive meshes have the potential to improve the accuracy and efficiency of atmospheric modelling by increasing resolution where it is most needed. Mesh re-distribution, or r-adaptivity, adapts by moving the mesh without changing the connectivity. This avoids some of the challenges with h-adaptivity (adding and removing points): the solution does not need to be mapped between meshes, which can be expensive and introduces errors, and there are no load balancing problems on parallel computers. A long standing problem with both forms of adaptivity has been changes in volume of the domain as resolution changes at an uneven boundary. We propose a solution which achieves exact local conservation and maintains a uniform scalar field while the mesh changes volume as it moves over orography. This is achieved by introducing a volume correction parameter which tracks the cell volumes without using expensive conservative mapping.A finite volume solution of the advection equation over orography on moving meshes is described and results are presented demonstrating improved accuracy for cost using moving meshes. Exact local conservation and maintenance of uniform scalar fields is demonstrated and the correct mesh volume is preserved.We use optimal transport to generate meshes which are guaranteed not to tangle and are equidistributed with respect to a monitor function. This leads to a Monge-Ampère equation which is solved with a Newton solver. The superiority of the Newton solver over other techniques is demonstrated in the appendix. However the Newton solver is only efficient if it is applied to the left hand side of the Monge-Ampère equation with fixed point iterations for the right hand side.