FESOM-C v.2: coastal dynamics on hybrid unstructured meshes

We describe FESOM-C, the coastal branch of the Finite-volumE Sea ice – Ocean Model (FESOM2), which shares with FESOM2 many numerical aspects, in particular its finite-volume cell-vertex discretization. Its dynamical core differs in the implementation of time stepping, the use of a terrain-following...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geoscientific Model Development
Main Authors: A. Androsov, V. Fofonova, I. Kuznetsov, S. Danilov, N. Rakowsky, S. Harig, H. Brix, K. H. Wiltshire
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Copernicus Publications 2019
Subjects:
Geology
QE1-996.5
Sea ice
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-1009-2019
https://doaj.org/article/4614ff5157f3413096a584aa133de56d
Description
Summary:We describe FESOM-C, the coastal branch of the Finite-volumE Sea ice – Ocean Model (FESOM2), which shares with FESOM2 many numerical aspects, in particular its finite-volume cell-vertex discretization. Its dynamical core differs in the implementation of time stepping, the use of a terrain-following vertical coordinate, and the formulation for hybrid meshes composed of triangles and quads. The first two distinctions were critical for coding FESOM-C as an independent branch. The hybrid mesh capability improves numerical efficiency, since quadrilateral cells have fewer edges than triangular cells. They do not suffer from spurious inertial modes of the triangular cell-vertex discretization and need less dissipation. The hybrid mesh capability allows one to use quasi-quadrilateral unstructured meshes, with triangular cells included only to join quadrilateral patches of different resolution or instead of strongly deformed quadrilateral cells. The description of the model numerical part is complemented by test cases illustrating the model performance.

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