Nodal High-Order Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for the Spherical Shallow Water Equations

Abstract

We develop and evaluate a high-order discontinuous Galerkin method for the solution of the shallow water equations on the sphere. To overcome well known problems with polar singularities, we consider the shallow water equations in Cartesian coordinates, augmented with a Lagrange multiplier to ensure that fluid particles are constrained to the spherical surface. The global solutions are represented by a collection of curvilinear quadrilaterals from an icosahedral grid. On each of these elements the local solutions are assumed to be well approximated by a high-order nodal Lagrange polynomial, constructed from a tensor-product of the Legendre- Gauss-Lobatto points which also supplies a high-order quadrature. The shallow water equations are satisfied in a local discontinuous element fashion with solution continuity being enforced weakly. The numerical experiments, involving a comparison of weak and strong conservation forms as well as the impact of over-integration, confirm the expected high-order accuracy and the potential for using such highly parallel formulations in numerical weather prediction.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2002
Accession Number
ADA633613

Entities

People

  • F. X. Giraldo
  • J. S. Hesthaven
  • T. Warburton

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Applied Mathematics
  • Cartesian Coordinates
  • Climate Change
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computational Science
  • Differential Equations
  • Equations
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Galerkin Method
  • Grids
  • Mathematics
  • Partial Differential Equations
  • Particles
  • Polynomials
  • Shallow Water
  • Weather Forecasting

Fields of Study

  • Mathematics

Readers

  • Finite Element Method (FEM) for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs)