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We derive an implicit-explicit (IMEX) formalism for the three-dimensional (3D) Euler equations that allow a unified representation of various nonhydrostatic flow regimes, including cloud resolving and mesoscale (flow in a 3D Cartesian domain) as well as global regimes (flow in spherical geometries). This general IMEX formalism admits numerous types of methods including single-stage multistep methods (e.g., Adams methods and backward difference formulas) and multistage singlestep methods (e.g., additive Runge-Kutta methods). The significance of this result is that it allows a numerical model to reuse the same machinery for all classes of time-integration methods described in this work. We also derive two classes of IMEX methods, one-dimensional and 3D, and show that they achieve their expected theoretical rates of convergence regardless of the geometry (e.g., 3D box or sphere) and introduce a new second-order IMEX Runge-Kutta method that performs better than the other second-order methods considered. We then compare all the IMEX methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency for two types of geophysical fluid dynamics problems: buoyant convection and inertia-gravity waves. These results show that the high-order time-integration methods yield better efficiency particularly when high levels of accuracy are desired. Introduction.In a previous article [20] we introduced the nonhydrostatic unified model of the atmosphere (NUMA) for use in limited-area modeling (i.e., mesoscale or regional flow), namely, applications in which the flows are in large, three-dimensional (3D) Cartesian domains (imagine flow in a 3D box where the grid resolutions are below 10 km); the emphasis of that paper was on the performance of the model on distributed-memory computers with a large number of processors. In that paper we showed that the explicit RK35 time integrator (also used in this paper) was able to achieve strong linear scaling for processor counts on the order of 10 5 . The emphasis of the present article is on the mathematical framework of the model dynamics (i.e., we are not considering the subgrid-scale parameterization at this point;

We present a high-order discontinuous Galerkin method for the solution of the shallow water equations on the sphere. To overcome well-known problems with polar singularities, we consider the shallow water equations in Cartesian coordinates, augmented with a Lagrange multiplier to ensure that fluid particles are constrained to the spherical surface. The global solutions are represented by a collection of curvilinear quadrilaterals from an icosahedral grid. On each of these elements the local solutions are assumed to be well approximated by a high-order nodal Lagrange polynomial, constructed from a tensor-product of the Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto points, which also supplies a high-order quadrature. The shallow water equations are satisfied in a local discontinuous element fashion with solution continuity being enforced weakly. The numerical experiments, involving a comparison of weak and strong conservation forms and the impact of over-integration and filtering, confirm the expected high-order accuracy and the potential for using such highly parallel formulations in numerical weather prediction. c 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)

A new dynamical core for numerical weather prediction (NWP) based on the spectral element method is presented. This paper represents a departure from previously published work on solving the atmospheric primitive equations in that the horizontal operators are all written, discretized, and solved in 3D Cartesian space. The advantages of using Cartesian space are that the pole singularity that plagues the equations in spherical coordinates disappears; any grid can be used, including latitude-longitude, icosahedral, hexahedral, and adaptive unstructured grids; and the conversion to a semi-Lagrangian formulation is easily achieved. The main advantage of using the spectral element method is that the horizontal operators can be approximated by local high-order elements while scaling efficiently on distributed-memory computers. In order to validate the 3D global atmospheric spectral element model, results are presented for seven test cases: three barotropic tests that confirm the exponential accuracy of the horizontal operators and four baroclinic test cases that validate the full 3D primitive hydrostatic equations. These four baroclinic test cases are the Rossby-Haurwitz wavenumber 4, the Held-Suarez test, and the Jablonowski-Williamson balanced initial state and baroclinic instability tests. Comparisons with four operational NWP and climate models demonstrate that the spectral element model is at least as accurate as spectral transform models while scaling linearly on distributed-memory computers.

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Abstract. We present semi-implicit (IMEX) formulations of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations (NSE) for applications in nonhydrostatic atmospheric modeling. The compressible NSE in nonhydrostatic atmospheric modeling include buoyancy terms that require special handling if one wishes to extract the Schur complement form of the linear implicit problem. We present results for five different forms of the compressible NSE and describe in detail how to formulate the semi-implicit time-integration method for these equations. Finally, we compare all five equations and compare the semi-implicit formulations of these equations both using the Schur and No Schur forms against an explicit Runge-Kutta method. Our simulations show that, if efficiency is the main criterion, it matters which form of the governing equations you choose. Furthermore, the semi-implicit formulations are faster than the explicit RungeKutta method for all the tests studied especially if the Schur form is used. While we have used the spectral element method for discretizing the spatial operators, the semi-implicit formulations that we derive are directly applicable to all other numerical methods. We show results for our five semi-implicit models for a variety of problems of interest in nonhydrostatic atmospheric modeling, including: inertia gravity waves, rising thermal bubbles (i.e., Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities), density current (i.e., Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities), and mountain test cases; the latter test case requires the implementation of non-reflecting boundary conditions. Therefore, we show results for all five semi-implicit models using the appropriate boundary conditions required in nonhydrostatic atmospheric modeling: no-flux (reflecting) and non-reflecting boundary conditions. It is shown that the non-reflecting boundary conditions exert a strong impact on the accuracy and efficiency of the models.Key words. compressible flow; element-based Galerkin methods; Euler; IMEX; Lagrange; Legendre; NavierStokes; nonhydrostatic; spectral elements; time-integration.AMS subject classifications. 65M60, 65M70, 35L65, 86A101. Introduction. It can be argued that the single most important property of an operational nonhydrostatic mesoscale atmospheric is efficiency. Clearly, this efficiency should not come at the cost of accuracy but if a weather center has the choice between a very accurate model and one that is efficient, they will probably pick the efficient one; however, as numerical analysts, we would like to build models that are both accurate and efficient. One way to achieve this goal is to construct numerical models based on high-order methods: this class of methods offers exponential (spectral) convergence for smooth problems and achieves excellent scalability on modern multi-core systems if they are used in an element-based approach (i.e., if the approximating polynomials have compact/local support). This is the idea behind element-based Galerkin methods such as spectral element (SE) and discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods (see [14] and [2...

Abstract.A discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element formulation is proposed for the solution of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations for a vertically stratified fluid, which are of interest in mesoscale nonhydrostatic atmospheric modeling. The resulting scheme naturally ensures conservation of mass, momentum, and energy. A semi-implicit time-integration approach is adopted to improve the efficiency of the scheme with respect to the explicit Runge-Kutta time integration strategies usually employed in the context of DG formulations. A method is also presented to reformulate the resulting linear system as a pseudo-Helmholtz problem. In doing this, we obtain a DG discretization closely related to those proposed for the solution of elliptic problems, and we show how to take advantage of the numerical integration rules (required in all DG methods for the area and flux integrals) to increase the efficiency of the solution algorithm. The resulting numerical formulation is then validated on a collection of classical two-dimensional test cases, including density driven flows and mountain wave simulations. The performance analysis shows that the semi-implicit method is, indeed, superior to explicit methods and that the pseudo-Helmholtz formulation yields further efficiency improvements. 1. Introduction. In recent years, great attention has been devoted to the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element method in the context of geophysical fluid dynamics applications. This is motivated by the fact that the DG framework simultaneously provides a high-order discretization, great flexibility in the choice of the computational grid, discrete balance relations, robustness with respect to unphysical oscillations, and compact computational stencils which are a key element in order to exploit distributed-memory parallel computers with up to tens of thousands of processors. Without attempting to provide a complete review of the literature, we mention here [47,2,30,39,34,32], where DG shallow water models are presented. The application of the DG method to compressible, nonhydrostatic atmospheric flows, using the Navier-Stokes equations or, when the flow is assumed to be inviscid, the Euler equations, is then considered in [31], where it is shown that the method represents a good candidate for the development of numerical climate and weather models. In the present paper, we continue the study initiated in [31] by focusing on the aspect of the time discretization which is, in fact, the most penalizing drawback of the DG method due to its high computational cost. This latter cost stems from the following