An adaptive discontinuous Galerkin method for modeling cumulus clouds
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Authors
Müller, Andreas
Behrens, Jörn
Giraldo, Francis X.
Wirth, Volkmar
Subjects
Discontinuous Galerkin
Large Eddy Simulation
Adaptive
Meteorology
Clouds
Semi-Implicit
Large Eddy Simulation
Adaptive
Meteorology
Clouds
Semi-Implicit
Advisors
Date of Issue
2010-06
Date
June 14-17, 2010
Publisher
Language
Abstract
Theoretical understanding and numerical modeling of atmospheric moist convection
still pose great challenges to meteorological research. The present work addresses
the following question: How important is mixing between cloudy and environmental air
for the development of a cumulus cloud? A Direct Numerical Simulation of a single cloud
is way beyond the capacity of today’s computing power. The use of a Large Eddy Simulation
in combination with semi-implicit time-integration and adaptive techniques offers a
significant reduction of complexity.
So far this work is restricted to dry flow in two-dimensional geometry. The compressible
Navier-Stokes equations are discretized using a discontinuous Galerkin method introduced
by Giraldo and Warburton in 2008. Time integration is done by a semi-implicit backward
difference. For the first time we combine these numerical methods with an h-adaptive
grid refinement. This refinement of our triangular grid is implemented with the function
library AMATOS and uses a space filling curve approach.
Validation through different test cases shows very good agreement between the current
results and those from the literature. For comparing different adaptivity setups we developed
a new qualitative error measure for the simulation of warm air bubbles. With the
help of this criterion we show that the simulation of a rising warm air bubble on a locally
refined grid can be more than six times faster than a similar computation on a uniform
mesh with the same accuracy.
Type
Article
Description
Series/Report No
Department
Applied Mathematics
Organization
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
Sponsors
Financial support for this work was provided by the priority program MetStröm (SPP 1276) of the german research foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). Francis X. Giraldo gratefully acknowledges the support of the Office of Naval Research through program element PE-0602435N.
Funder
Format
Citation
V European Conference on Computational Fluid Dynamics, ECCOMAS CFD 2010
J. C. F. Pereira and A. Sequeira (Eds), Lisbon, Portugal,14-17 June 2010
Distribution Statement
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This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.