Exploring a Multi-Resolution Approach within the Shallow-Water System

Abstract

The goal of this project is to explore how multi-resolution grids effect global shallow-water models. Our approach is to generate high-quality Spherical Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations (SCVTs) that result in two dominate resolutions, where one resolution (the fine scale) covers the region of interest and the other resolution (the coarse scale) covers the rest of the sphere. The two dominate scales are separated by a mesh transition zone that, like the fine and coarse scales, is easily altered through the user-specified mesh-density function. We apply our finite-volume solver along with these variable resolution SCVTs to the standard suite of shallow-water test cases in order to highlight the strengths and weakens of this multi-resolution approach.