A Scalable Spectral Element Eulerian Atmospheric Model (SEE-AM) for NWP: Dynamical Core Tests

Abstract

A new dynamical core for numerical weather prediction (NWP) based on the spectral element method is presented. This paper represents a departure from previously published work on solving the atmospheric primitive equations in that the horizontal operators are all written, discretized, and solved in 3D Cartesian space. The advantages of using Cartesian space are that the pole singularity that plagues the equations in spherical coordinates disappears; any grid can be used, including latitude–longitude, icosahedral, hexahedral, and adaptive unstructured grids; and the conversion to a semi-Lagrangian formulation is easily achieved. The main advantage of using the spectral element method is that the horizontal operators can be approximated by local high-order elements while scaling efficiently on distributed-memory computers. In order to validate the 3D global atmospheric spectral element model, results are presented for seven test cases: three barotropic tests that confirm the exponential accuracy of the horizontal operators and four baroclinic test cases that validate the full 3D primitive hydrostatic equations. These four baroclinic test cases are the Rossby–Haurwitz wavenumber 4, the Held–Suarez test, and the Jablonowski–Williamson balanced initial state and baroclinic instability tests. Comparisons with four operational NWP and climate models demonstrate that the spectral element model is at least as accurate as spectral transform models while scaling linearly on distributed-memory computers.