Verification of a non-hydrostatic dynamical core using horizontally spectral element vertically finite difference method

In this presentation, a new non-hydrostatic (NH) dynamical core using the spectral element method (SEM) in the horizontal discretization and the finite difference method (FDM) in the vertical discretization will be presented. By using horizontal SEM, which decomposes the physical domain into smaller pieces with a small communication stencil, we can achieve a high level of scalability. Also by using vertical FDM, we provide an easy way for coupling the dynamics and existing physics packages.

The Euler equations used here are in a flux form based on the hybrid sigma hydrostatic pressure vertical coordinate, which are similar to those used in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. Within these Euler equations, we use a time-split third-order Runge-Kutta (RK3) for the time discretization.

In order to establish robustness, firstly the NH dynamical core is verified in a simplified two dimensional (2D) slice framework by conducting widely used standard benchmark tests, and then we verify the global three dimensional (3D) dynamical core on the cubed-sphere grid with several test cases introduced by Dynamical Core Model Intercomparison Project (DCMIP).