Coriolis weighting on unstructured staggered grids

摘要

There is an increasing interest to move ocean codes from classical Cartesian staggered mesh schemes to unstructured staggered grids. By using unstructured grid models one may construct meshes that follow the coastlines more accurately, and it is easy to apply a finer resolution in areas of special interest. In this paper we focus on how to approximate the Coriolis terms in such unstructured staggered grid models using equivalents of the Arakawa C-grid for the linear equations governing the propagation of the inertia-gravity waves. We base the analysis on a Delaunay triangulation of the region in question and use the Voronoi points and the midpoints on the triangle edges to define a staggered grid for the sea elevation and the velocity orthogonal to the edges of the triangles. It is shown that a standard method for the Coriolis weighting may create unphysical growth of the numerical solutions. A modified Coriolis weighting that conserves the total energy is suggested. In real applications diffusion is often introduced both for physical reasons, but often also in order to stabilise the numerical experiments. The growing modes associated with the unstructured staggered grids and equal weighting may force us to enhance the diffusion more than we would like from physical considerations. The modified weighting offers a simple solution to this problem. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.