Error measures for finite element ocean modelling ...

• Main Author: Power, Philip William
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: unknown
• Published: Imperial College London 2023
• Subjects: Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.25560/104969; http://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/handle/10044/1/104969

This thesis presents goal-based error measures and applies them, via appropriate metric tensors, to the adaptation of three dimensional anisotropic tetrahedral finite element meshes for a range of oceanographic modelling problems. The overall aim of this work is to produce error measures which are able to resolve the flow features of an ocean over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales simultaneously. For example, western boundary currents, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), equatorial jets, meddies (mid-latitude eddies) and Open Ocean Deep Convection. Conventional numerical ocean models generally use static meshes. The use of dynamically-adaptive meshes has many potential advantages but needs to be guided by an error measure. Mesh quality is gauged with respect to the metric tensor which embodies the error measure, such that an ideal element has sides of unit length when measured with respect to this metric tensor. The result is meshes in which each finite element node has approximately equal ...