SWIFT: A Monotonic, Flux-Form Semi-Lagrangian Tracer Transport Scheme for Flow with Large Courant Numbers

TL;DR

The paper introduces SWIFT, a flux-form semi-Lagrangian scheme that ensures local mass and entropy conservation, monotonicity, and positivity for tracer transport in flow with large Courant numbers, suitable for climate models.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-dimensional SWIFT scheme that inherits monotonicity and positivity from one-dimensional calculations, improving tracer transport accuracy and conservation.

Findings

Ensures conservation of mass and entropy in large Courant number flows.

Maintains monotonicity and positivity in multi-dimensional tracer transport.

Compatible with vertically-staggered grids like Charney-Phillips.

Abstract

Local conservation of mass and entropy are becoming increasingly desirable properties for modern numerical weather and climate models. This work presents a Flux-Form Semi-Lagrangian (FFSL) transport scheme, called SWIFT, that facilitates this conservation for tracer variables, whilst maintaining other vital properties such as preservation of a constant, monotonicity and positivity. Importantly, these properties all hold for large Courant numbers and multi-dimensional flow, making the scheme appropriate for use within a dynamical core which takes large time steps. The SWIFT scheme presented here can be seen as an evolution of the FFSL methods of Leonard et al and Lin and Rood. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional schemes consist of a splitting into a sequence of one-dimensional calculations. The new SWIFT splitting presented here allows monotonic and positivity properties from the one-dimensional calculations to be inherited by the multi-dimensional scheme. These one-dimensional calculations involve separating the mass flux into terms that correspond to integer and fractional parts of the Courant number. Key to achieving conservation is coupling the transport of tracers to the transport of the fluid density, through re-use of the discrete mass flux that was calculated from the fluid density in the transport of the tracers. This work also describes how these properties can still be attained when the tracer is vertically-staggered from the density in a Charney-Phillips grid.