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FVM 1.0: a nonhydrostatic finite-volume dynamical core for IFS

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posted on 2019-01-30, 14:34 authored by Christian Kühnlein, Willem Deconinck, Rupert Klein, Sylvie Malardel, Zbigniew P. Piotrowski, Piotr K. Smolarkiewicz, Joanna SzmelterJoanna Szmelter, Nils P. Wedi
We present a nonhydrostatic finite-volume global atmospheric model formulation for numerical weather prediction with the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) at ECMWF, and compare it to the established operational spectral-transform formulation. The novel Finite-Volume Module of IFS (henceforth IFS-FVM) integrates the fully compressible equations using semi-implicit time stepping and non-oscillatory forward-in-time (NFT) Eulerian advection, whereas the spectral-transform IFS solves the hydrostatic primitive equations (optionally the fully compressible equations) using a semi-implicit semi-Lagrangian scheme. The IFS-FVM complements the spectral-transform counterpart by means of the finite-volume discretisation with a local communication footprint, fully conservative and monotone advective transport, all-scale deep-atmosphere fully compressible equations in a generalised height-based vertical coordinate, applicable on flexible meshes. Nevertheless, both the finite-volume and spectral-transform formulations can share the same quasi-uniform horizontal grid with co-located arrangement of variables, geospherical longitude-latitude coordinates, and physical parametrisations, thereby facilitating their comparison, coexistence and combination in IFS. We highlight the advanced semi-implicit NFT finite-volume integration of the fully compressible equations of the novel IFS-FVM considering comprehensive moist-precipitating dynamics with coupling to the IFS cloud parametrisation by means of a generic interface. These developments - including a new horizontal-vertical split NFT MPDATA advective transport scheme, variable time stepping, effective preconditioning of the elliptic Helmholtz solver in the semi-implicit scheme, and a computationally efficient coding implementation - provide a basis for the efficacy of IFS-FVM and its application in global numerical weather prediction. Here, numerical experiments focus on relevant dry and moist-precipitating baroclinic instability at various resolutions. We show that the presented semi-implicit NFT finite-volume integration scheme on co-located meshes of IFS-FVM can provide highly competitive solution quality and computational performance to the proven semi-implicit semi-Lagrangian integration scheme of the spectral-transform IFS.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

Geoscientific Model Development

Volume

12

Issue

2

Pages

651 - 676

Citation

KUEHNLEIN, C. ... et al, 2019. FVM 1.0: a nonhydrostatic finite-volume dynamical core formulation for IFS. Geoscientific Model Development, 12 (2), pp.651-676.

Publisher

Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© Authors

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2019-01-22

Publication date

2019-02-13

Copyright date

2019

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Copernicus under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

eISSN

1991-9603

Language

  • en

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