A Finite-Volume Icosahedral Shallow-Water Model on a Local Coordinate

Abstract An icosahedral-hexagonal shallow-water model (SWM) on the sphere is formulated on a local Cartesian coordinate based on the general stereographic projection plane. It is discretized with the third-order Adam–Bashforth time-differencing scheme and the second-order finite-volume operators for spatial derivative terms. The finite-volume operators are applied to the model variables defined on the nonstaggered grid with the edge variables interpolated using polynomial interpolation. The projected local coordinate reduces the solution space from the three-dimensional, curved, spherical surface to the two-dimensional plane and thus reduces the number of complete sets of basis functions in the Vandermonde matrix, which is the essential component of the interpolation. The use of a local Cartesian coordinate also greatly simplifies the mathematic formulation of the finite-volume operators and leads to the finite-volume integration along straight lines on the plane, rather than along curved lines on the sph...