Conservative interpolation between general spherical meshes
An efficient, local, explicit, second-order, conservative interpolation algorithm between spherical meshes is presented. The cells composing the source and target meshes may be either spherical polygons or latitude–longitude quadrilaterals. Second-order accuracy is obtained by piece-wise linear fini...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2017-01-01
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| Series: | Geoscientific Model Development |
| Online Access: | http://www.geosci-model-dev.net/10/425/2017/gmd-10-425-2017.pdf |
| Summary: | An efficient, local, explicit, second-order, conservative interpolation
algorithm between spherical meshes is presented. The cells composing the
source and target meshes may be either spherical polygons or
latitude–longitude quadrilaterals. Second-order accuracy is obtained by
piece-wise linear finite-volume reconstruction over the source mesh. Global
conservation is achieved through the introduction of a <q>supermesh</q>, whose cells
are all possible intersections of source and target cells. Areas and
intersections are computed exactly to yield a geometrically exact method. The
main efficiency bottleneck caused by the construction of the supermesh is
overcome by adopting tree-based data structures and algorithms, from which
the mesh connectivity can also be deduced efficiently.<br><br>The theoretical second-order accuracy is verified using a smooth test
function and pairs of meshes commonly used for atmospheric modelling.
Experiments confirm that the most expensive operations, especially the
supermesh construction, have <i>O</i>(<i>N</i><i>log</i><i>N</i>) computational cost. The method
presented is meant to be incorporated in pre- or post-processing atmospheric
modelling pipelines, or directly into models for flexible input/output. It
could also serve as a basis for conservative coupling between model
components, e.g., atmosphere and ocean. |
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| ISSN: | 1991-959X 1991-9603 |