We introduce and analyze two new semi-discrete numerical methods for the multi-dimensional Vlasov-Poisson system. The schemes are constructed by combing a discontinuous Galerkin approximation to the Vlasov equation together with a mixed finite element method for the Poisson problem. We show optimal error estimates in the case of smooth compactly supported initial data. We propose a scheme that preserves the total energy of the system.

The computation of compressible flows becomes more challenging when the Mach number has different orders of magnitude. When the Mach number is of order one, modern shock capturing methods are able to capture shocks and other complex structures with high numerical resolutions. However, if the Mach number is small, the acoustic waves lead to stiffness in time and exces-sively large numerical viscosity, thus demanding much smaller time step and mesh size than normally needed for incompressible flow simulation. In this paper, we develop an all-speed asymptotic preserving (AP) numerical scheme for the compressible isentropic Euler and Navier-Stokes equations that is uni-formly stable and accurate for all Mach numbers. Our idea is to split the system into two parts: one involves a slow, nonlinear and conservative hyper-bolic system adequate for the use of modern shock capturing methods, and the other a linear hyperbolic system which contains the stiff acoustic dynam-ics, to be solved implicitly. This implicit part is reformulated into a standard pressure Poisson projection system, and thus possesses sufficient structure for efficient fast Fourier transform solution techniques. In the zero Mach number limit, the scheme automatically becomes a projection method-like incompress-ible solver. We present numerical results in one and two dimensions in both compressible and incompressible regimes.

Atmospheric temperature is one of the most important climate variables. This observational study presents detailed descriptions of the temperature variability imprinted in the 9-year brightness temperature data acquired by the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit- Instrument A (AMSU-A) aboard Aqua since September 2002 over tropical oceans. A non-linear, adaptive method called the Ensemble Joint Multiple Extraction has been employed to extract the principal modes of variability in the AMSU-A/Aqua data. The semi-annual, annual, quasibiennial oscillation (QBO) modes and QBO–annual beat in the troposphere and the stratosphere have been successfully recovered. The modulation by the El Nin˜o/Southern oscillation (ENSO) in the troposphere was found and correlates well with the Multivariate ENSO Index. The longterm variations during 2002–2011 reveal a cooling trend (-0.5 K/decade at 10 hPa) in the tropical stratosphere; the trend below the tropical tropopause is not statistically significant due to the length of our data. A new tropospheric near-annual mode (period *1.6 years) was also revealed in the troposphere, whose existence was confirmed using National Centers for Environmental Prediction Reanalysis air temperature data. The near-annual mode in the troposphere is found to prevail in the eastern Pacific region and is coherent with a near-annual mode in the observed sea surface temperature over the Warm Pool region that has previously been reported. It remains a challenge for climate models to simulate the trends and principal modes of natural variability reported in this work.

In this paper, we develop high-order bound-preserving (BP) discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for the coupled system of compressible miscible displacements on triangular meshes. We consider the problem with multi-component fluid mixture and the (volumetric) concentration of the $j$th component, $c_j$, should be between 0 and 1. There are three main difficulties. Firstly, $c_j$ does not satisfy a maximum-principle. Therefore, the numerical techniques introduced in (X. Zhang and C.-W. Shu, Journal of Computational Physics, 229 (2010), 3091-3120) cannot be applied directly. The main idea is to apply the positivity-preserving techniques to all $c_j's$ and enforce $\sum_jc_j=1$ simultaneously to obtain physically relevant approximations. By doing so, we have to treat the time derivative of the pressure $dp/dt$ as a source in the concentration equation and choose suitable fluxes in the pressure and concentration equations. Secondly, it is not easy to construct first-order numerical fluxes for interior penalty DG methods on triangular meshes. One of the key points in the high-order BP technique applied in this paper is the combination of high-order and lower-order numerical fluxes. We will construct second-order BP schemes and use the second-order numerical fluxes as the lower-order one. Finally, the classical slope limiter cannot be applied to $c_j$. To construct the BP technique, we will not approximate $c_j$ directly. Therefore, a new limiter will be introduced. Numerical experiments will be given to demonstrate the high-order accuracy and good performance of the numerical technique.

In this paper, we consider the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods to solve linear hyperbolic equations with singular initial data. With the help of weight functions, the superconvergence properties outside the pollution region will be investigated. We show that, by using piecewise polynomials of degree $k$ and suitable initial discretizations, the DG solution is $(2k+1)$-th order accurate at the downwind points and $(k+2)$-th order accurate at all the other downwind-biased Radau points. Moreover, the derivative of error between the DG and exact solutions converges at a rate of $k+1$ at all the interior upwind-biased Radau points. Besides the above, the DG solution is also $(k+2)$-th order accurate towards a particular projection of the exact solution and the numerical cell averages are $(2k+1)$-th order accurate. Numerical experiments are presented to confirm the theoretical results.