Vortex Simulations in an Element-Based Galerkin Shallow Water Model Using Adaptive Mesh Refinement

Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) allows for dynamic refining of a numerical model grid in specific regions. The major benefit of AMR is that the flow can be high resolved in localized regions of interest, thereby obtaining an accurate result in that region, while saving on computational expense. A natural meteorological phenomenon that would benefit from AMR is a tropical cyclone. In this talk, AMR simulations are conducted for tropical cyclone-like vortices in a shallow water model based on continuous or discontinuous Galerkin numerical methods. As a first test, the accuracy and computational efficiency of AMR versus non-AMR simulations is examined for the case of an advecting vortex. The AMR simulations are further used to examine inner-core dynamical processes in tropical cyclones, including barotropic instability of the eyewall and eye-eyewall mixing. The utility of AMR is clearly demonstrated in this context, as AMR is able to resolve processes important to tropical cyclone intensity that are typically unresolved in most models. on 7-31-2013-->