Horizontally Explicit and Vertically Implicit (HEVI) Time Discretization Scheme for a Discontinuous Galerkin Nonhydrostatic Model

Abstract

Abstract A two-dimensional nonhydrostatic (NH) atmospheric model based on the compressible Euler system has been developed in the (x, z) Cartesian domain. The spatial discretization is based on a nodal discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method with exact integration. The orography is handled by the terrain-following height-based coordinate system. The time integration uses the horizontally explicit and vertically implicit (HEVI) time-splitting scheme, which is introduced to address the stringent restriction on the explicit time step size due to a high aspect ratio between the horizontal (x) and vertical (z) spatial discretization. The HEVI scheme is generally based on the Strang-type operator-split approach, where the horizontally propagating waves in the Euler system are solved explicitly while the vertically propagating waves are treated implicitly. As a consequence, the HEVI scheme relaxes the maximum allowed time step to be mainly determined by the horizontal grid spacing. The accuracy of the HEVI scheme is rigorously compared against that of the explicit strong stability-preserving (SSP) Runge–Kutta (RK) scheme using several NH benchmark test cases. The HEVI scheme shows a second-order temporal convergence, as expected. The results of the HEVI scheme are qualitatively comparable to those of the SSP-RK3 scheme. Moreover, the HEVI DG formulation can also be seamlessly extended to account for the second-order diffusion as in the case of the standard SSP-RK DG formulation. In the presence of orography, the HEVI scheme produces high quality results, which are visually identical to those produced by the SSP-RK3 scheme.