An Investigation of Finite Difference and Finite Element Vertical Schemes for the Baroclinic Prediction Equations

Abstract

The vertical discretization in a linearized baroclinic prediction model was analyzed by comparing various finite element and finite difference solutions following Jordan (1985) and Shapiro (1987). The baroclinic instability experiments of Shapiro (1987) were augmented to include the unstaggered vertical scheme from Jordan (1985). Two basic wind profiles were used and the experiments were run with different resolution models and horizontal wavelengths. For a given wind profile and vertical resolution, different models performed better. The finite element models for the staggered vertical grids did not perform up to their possibilities due to the boundary elements. However, for the unstaggered vertical grid, the finite element model did better than the finite difference model in most cases. Keywords: Theses; Nonlinear vertical shear; Galerkin method; Numerical weather prediction; Finite elements; Finite differences; Baroclinic instability.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 1988
Accession Number
ADA200825

Entities

People

  • Donn E. Sloniker

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Air Force
  • Boundaries
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computational Science
  • Engineering
  • Equations
  • Finite Element Analysis
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Grids
  • Instability
  • Mathematics
  • Meteorology
  • Research Facilities
  • United States
  • Weather Forecasting
  • Wind

Readers

  • Atmospheric Science / Meteorology, specifically Wind Wave Turbulence.
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Finite Element Method (FEM) for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs)