Global Transport on a Spherical Multiple-Cell Grid

Abstract

Second- and third-order upstream nonoscillatory (UNO) advection schemes are applied on a spherical multiple-cell (SMC) grid for global transport. Similar to the reduced grid, the SMC grid relaxes the Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy (CFL) restriction of the Eulerian advection time step on the conventional latitude–longitude grid by zonally merging cells toward the poles. Round polar cells are introduced to remove the polar singularity of the spherical coordinate system. The unstructured feature of the SMC grid allows unused cells to be removed out of memory and transport calculations. Solid-body rotation and deformation flow tests are used for comparison with other transport schemes. Application on the global ocean surface is used to demonstrate the flexibility of the SMC grid by removing all land points and making possible the extension of global ocean surface wave models to cover the Arctic in response to the retreating sea ice in recent summers. Numerical results suggest that UNO schemes on the SMC grid are suitable for global transport.