Modeling the Atmospheric General Circulation Using a Spherical Geodesic Grid: A New Class of Dynamical Cores

This paper documents the development and testing of a new type of atmospheric dynamical core. The model solves the vorticity and divergence equations in place of the momentum equation. The model is discretized in the horizontal using a geodesic grid that is nearly uniform over the entire globe. The geodesic grid is formed by recursively bisecting the triangular faces of a regular icosahedron and projecting those new vertices onto the surface of the sphere. All of the analytic horizontal operators are reduced to line integrals, which are numerically evaluated with second-order accuracy. In the vertical direction the model can use a variety of coordinate systems, including a generalized sigma coordinate that is attached to the top of the boundary layer. Terms related to gravity wave propagation are isolated and an efficient semi-implicit time-stepping scheme is implemented. Since this model combines many of the positive attributes of both spectral models and conventional finite-difference models into a single dynamical core, it represents a distinctively new approach to modeling the atmosphere's general circulation.