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Impact of Local Grid Refinements of Spherical Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations for Global Atmospheric Models

Part of: Probabilistic methods, simulation and stochastic differential equations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2017

Yudi Liu  and
Taojin Yang
Yudi Liu*
Affiliation:
Institute of Meteorology and Oceanography, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 211101, P.R. China National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, USA
Taojin Yang*
Affiliation:
Institute of Meteorology and Oceanography, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 211101, P.R. China
*
*Corresponding author. Email addresses:[email protected] (Y. Liu), [email protected] (T. Yang)
*Corresponding author. Email addresses:[email protected] (Y. Liu), [email protected] (T. Yang)
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Abstract

In order to study the local refinement issue of the horizontal resolution for a global model with Spherical Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations (SCVTs), the SCVTs are set to 10242 cells and 40962 cells respectively using the density function. The ratio between the grid resolutions in the high and low resolution regions (hereafter RHL) is set to 1:2, 1:3 and 1:4 for 10242 cells and 40962 cells, and the width of the grid transition zone (for simplicity, WTZ) is set to 18° and 9° to investigate their impacts on the model simulation. The ideal test cases, i.e. the cosine bell and global steady-state nonlinear zonal geostrophic flow, are carried out with the above settings. Simulation results showthat the larger the RHL is, the larger the resulting error is. It is obvious that the 1:4 ratio gives rise to much larger errors than the 1:2 or 1:3 ratio; the errors resulting from the WTZ is much smaller than that from the RHL. No significant wave distortion or reflected waves are found when the fluctuation passes through the refinement region, and the error is significantly small in the refinement region. Therefore,when designing a local refinement scheme in the global model with SCVT, the RHL should be less than 1:4, i.e., the error is acceptable when the RHL is 1:2 or 1:3.

Keywords

Spherical Centroidal Voronoi Tessellationlocal refinementnumerical experimentswidth of the transition zoneratio between high resolution and low resolution

MSC classification

Secondary: 86-08: Computational methods 65C20: Models, numerical methods
Type
Research Article
Information
Communications in Computational Physics , Volume 21 , Issue 5 , May 2017 , pp. 1310 - 1324
Copyright
Copyright © Global-Science Press 2017 

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Footnotes

Communicated by Lianjie Huang

References

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