| We present new numerical methods for the shallow water equations on a sphere in spherical coordinates. In our implementation, the equations are discretized in time with the two-level semi-Lagrangian semi-implicit (SLSI) method, and in space on a staggered grid with the quadratic spline Galerkin (QSG) and the optimal quadratic spline collocation (OQSC) methods. When discretized on a uniform spatial grid, the solutions are shown through numerical experiments to be fourth-order in space locally at the nodes and midpoints of the spatial grids, and third-order globally.; We also show that, when applied to a simplified version of the shallow water equations, each of our algorithms yields a neutrally stable solution for the meteorologically significant Rossby waves. Moreover, we demonstrate that the Helmholtz equation associated with the shallow water equations should be derived algebraically rather than analytically in order for the algorithms to be stable with respect to the Rossby waves. These results are verified numerically using Boyd's equatorial wave equations with initial conditions to generate a soliton.; We then analyze the performance of our methods on various staggered grids—the A-, B-, and C-grids. From an eigenvalue analysis of our simplified version of the shallow water equations, we conclude that, when discretized on the C-grid, our algorithms faithfully capture the group velocity of inertia-gravity waves. Our analysis suggests that neither the A- nor B-grids will produce such good results. Our theoretical results are supported by numerical experiments, in which we discretize Boyd's equatorial wave equations using different staggered grids and set the initial conditions for the problem to generate gravitation modes instead of a soliton. With both the A- and B-grids, some waves are observed to travel in the wrong direction, whereas, with the C-grid, gravity waves of all wavelengths propagate in the correct direction. |
