A high-order conservative collocation scheme and its application to global shallow-water equations

Abstract

In this paper, an efficient and conservative collocation method is proposed and used to develop a global shallow-water model. Being a nodal type high-order scheme, the present method solves the pointwise values of dependent variables as the unknowns within each control volume. The solution points are arranged as Gauss-Legendre points to achieve high-order accuracy. The time evolution equations to update the unknowns are derived under the flux reconstruction (FR) framework (Huynh, 2007). Constraint conditions used to build the spatial reconstruction for the flux function include the pointwise values of flux function at the solution points, which are computed directly from the dependent variables, as well as the numerical fluxes at the boundaries of the computational element, which are obtained as Riemann solutions between the adjacent elements. Given the reconstructed flux function, the time tendencies of the unknowns can be obtained directly from the governing equations of differential form. The resulting schemes have super convergence and rigorous numerical conservativeness. A three-point scheme of fifth-order accuracy is presented and analyzed in this paper. The proposed scheme is adopted to develop the global shallow-water model on the cubed-sphere grid, where the local high-order reconstruction is very beneficial for the data communications between adjacent patches. We have used the standard benchmark tests to verify the numerical model, which reveals its great potential as a candidate formulation for developing high-performance general circulation models.