A fourth-order finite difference method is proposed and studied for the primitive equations (PEs) of large-scale atmospheric and oceanic flow based on mean vorticity formulation. Since the vertical average of the horizontal velocity field is divergence-free, we can introduce mean vorticity and mean stream function which are connected by a 2-D Poisson equation. As a result, the PEs can be reformulated such that the prognostic equation for the horizontal velocity is replaced by evolutionary equa-tions for the mean vorticity field and the vertical derivative of the horizontal velocity. The mean vorticity equation is approximated by a compact difference scheme due to the difficulty of the mean vorticity boundary condition, while fourth-order long-stencil approximations are utilized to deal with transport type equations for computational convenience. The numerical values for the total velocity field (both horizontal and vertical) are statically determined by a discrete realization of a differential equation at each fixed horizontal point. The method is highly efficient and is capable of produc-ing highly resolved solutions at a reasonable computational cost. The full fourth-order accuracy is checked by an example of the reformulated PEs with force terms. Addi-tionally, numerical results of a large-scale oceanic circulation are presented.

The authors establish error estimates for recently developed finite-element methods for incompressible viscous flow in domains with no-slip boundary conditions. The methods arise by discretization of a well-posed extended Navier-Stokes dynamics for which pressure is determined from current velocity and force fields. The methods use C1 elements for velocity and C0 elements for pressure. A stability estimate is proved for a related finite-element projection method close to classical time-splitting methods of Orszag, Israeli, DeVille and Karniadakis.

We present a mathematical analysis of the asymptotic preserving scheme proposed in [M. Lemou and L. Mieussens, SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 31, pp. 334-368, 2008] for linear transport equations in kinetic and diffusive regimes. We prove that the scheme is uniformly stable and accurate with respect to the mean free path of the particles. This property is satisfied under an explicitly given CFL condition. This condition tends to a parabolic CFL condition for small mean free paths, and is close to a convection CFL condition for large mean free paths. Ou r analysis is based on very simple energy estimates.

How to properly specify boundary conditions for pressure is a longstanding problem for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations with no-slip boundary conditions. An analytical resolution of this issue stems from a recently developed formula for the pressure in terms of the commutator of the Laplacian and Leray projection operators. Here we make use of this formula to (a) improve the accuracy of computing pressure in two kinds of existing time-discrete projection methods implicit in viscosity only, and (b) devise new higher-order accurate time-discrete projection methods that extend a slip-correction idea behind the well-known finite-difference scheme of Kim and Moin. We test these schemes for stability and accuracy using various combinations of C0 finite elements. For all three kinds of time discretization, one can obtain third-order accuracy for both pressure and velocity without a time-step stability restriction of diffusive type. Furthermore, two kinds of projection methods are found stable using piecewise-linear elements for both velocity and pressure.

In this article the authors present a new solver for the Poisson problem on spherical shells. The method is derived by application of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) in all three spherical variables. Through a particular change of variables valid on spherical shells, this new approach avoids a variable coefficient on the radial differential operator, resulting in a constant-coefficient formulation that can be fast-diagonalized via FFT. The authors describe the Fourier expansion in the angular variables and the fast diagonalization of the radial derivative using the FFT, including second-, fourth- and sixth-order finite difference approximations. An algorithmic description of the sixth-order solver is described, and numerical tests that demonstrate the theoretical rate of convergence are presented.