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At least 37 records · Page 2

Modeling of Convective-Stratiform Precipitation Processes: Sensitivity to Partitioning Methods and Numerical Advection Schemes

Six different convective-stratiform separation techniques, including a new technique that utilizes the ratio of vertical and terminal velocities, are compared and evaluated using two-dimensional numerical simulations of a tropical [Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA COARE)] and midlatitude continental [Preliminary Regional Experiment for STORM-Central (PRESTORM)] squall line. The simulations are made using two different numerical advection schemes: 4th order and positive definite advection. Comparisons are made in terms of rainfall, cloud coverage, mass fluxes, apparent heating and moistening, mean hydrometeor profiles, CFADs (Contoured Frequency with Altitude Diagrams), microphysics, and latent heating retrieval. Overall, it was found that the different separation techniques produced results that qualitatively agreed. However, the quantitative differences were significant. Observational comparisons were unable to conclusively evaluate the performance of the techniques. Latent heating retrieval was shown to be sensitive to the use of separation technique mainly due to the stratiform region for methods that found very little stratiform rain. The midlatitude PRESTORM simulation was found to be nearly invariant with respect to advection type for most quantities while for TOGA COARE fourth order advection produced numerous shallow convective cores and positive definite advection fewer cells that were both broader and deeper penetrating above the freezing level.

Lang, Steve↗

Non-Diffusive Volume Advection with A High Order Interface Reconstruction Method

We show that non-diffusive volume advection in two-dimensions is achieved with several benchmark problems using a newly developed high-order volume of fluids (VOF) interface reconstruction method. (1) A new VOF interface reconstruction method using circular/corner facets (linear facets are a degenerate case of arcs). We create a circular interface facet in each mixed zone by matching neighbor volume with a hybrid Newton’s-bisection method and the local solution is final. In the general case, the new VOF interface reconstruction has 3rd order accuracy and can be easily made seamless. The new method addresses intrinsic issues with Young’s method such as gaps between interface facets in the case of a curved interface, and inability to define curvature nor identify corners. (2) A non-diffusive volume advection scheme. In an ALE advection step, a well-defined interface can be carried over through a Lagrange step and used to compute volume distribution into a relaxed mesh. Then, an interface reconstruction step is performed to redefine the interface in the relaxed mesh. We must point out that the interface carried over is also a solution of interface reconstruction because all the volume fractions in the relaxed mesh are naturally matched. We provide an interface tracking method compatible with our reconstruction scheme, where it is granted to use the prior info as an initial guess to capture sub-mesh resolution features. As a result, we are able to treat multiple facets inside a single mixed cell and obtain highly accurate, non-diffusive solution for advection problems with rather coarse meshes. We show our solutions for two-dimensional incompressible flows with two materials with a) the X + O diagonal translation; b) the Zalesak rotational test; and c) the single vortex spiral test.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Unifying Advective and Diffusive Descriptions of Bedform Pumping in the Benthic Biolayer of Streams

Abstract Many water quality and ecosystem functions performed by streams occur in the benthic biolayer, the biologically active upper (~5 cm) layer of the streambed. Solute transport through the benthic biolayer is facilitated by bedform pumping, a physical process in which dynamic and static pressure variations over the surface of stationary bedforms (e.g., ripples and dunes) drive flow across the sediment‐water interface. In this paper we derive two predictive modeling frameworks, one advective and the other diffusive, for solute transport through the benthic biolayer by bedform pumping. Both frameworks closely reproduce patterns and rates of bedform pumping previously measured in the laboratory, provided that the diffusion model's dispersion coefficient declines exponentially with depth. They are also functionally equivalent, such that parameter sets inferred from the 2D advective model can be applied to the 1D diffusive model, and vice versa. The functional equivalence and complementary strengths of these two models expand the range of questions that can be answered, for example, by adopting the 2D advective model to study the effects of geomorphic processes (such as bedform adjustments to land use change) on flow‐dependent processes and the 1D diffusive model to study problems where multiple transport mechanisms combine (such as bedform pumping and turbulent diffusion). By unifying 2D advective and 1D diffusive descriptions of bedform pumping, our analytical results provide a straightforward and computationally efficient approach for predicting, and better understanding, solute transport in the benthic biolayer of streams and coastal sediments.

Grant, Stanley B.↗

The Sensitivity of Model Ozone to Advective and Photochemical Processes in the High Latitude Winter Lower Stratosphere

Three dimensional chemistry and transport models (CTMs) contain a set of coupled continuity equations which describe the evolution of constituents such as ozone and other minor species which affect ozone. Both advection and photochemical processes contribute to constituent evolution, and a CTM provides a means to evaluate these contributions separately. Such evaluation is particularly useful when both terms are important to the modeled tendency. An example is the ozone tendency in the high latitude winter lower stratosphere, where advection tends to increase ozone, and catalytic processes involving chlorine radicals tend to decrease ozone. The Goddard three dimensional chemistry and transport model uses meteorological fields from the Goddard Earth Observing System Data Assimilation System, thus the modeled ozone evolution may reproduce the observed evolution and provide a test of the model representation of photochemical processes if the transport is shown to be modeled appropriately. We have investigated the model advection further using diabatic trajectory calculations. For long lived constituents such as N2O, the model field for a particular time on a potential temperature surface is compared with a field produced by calculating 15 day back trajectories for a fixed latitude longitude grid, and mapping model N2O at the terminus of the back trajectories onto the initial grid. This provides a quantitative means to evaluate two aspects of the CTM transport: one, the model horizontal gradient between middle latitudes and the polar vortex is compared with the gradient produced using the non-diffusive trajectory calculation; two, the model vertical advection, which is produced by the divergence of the horizontal winds, is compared with the vertical transport expected from diabatic cooling.

Douglass, A.↗

Sensitivity of Age-of-Air Calculations to the Choice of Advection Scheme

The age of air has recently emerged as a diagnostic of atmospheric transport unaffected by chemical parameterizations, and the features in the age distributions computed in models have been interpreted in terms of the models' large-scale circulation field. This study shows, however, that in addition to the simulated large-scale circulation, three-dimensional age calculations can also be affected by the choice of advection scheme employed in solving the tracer continuity equation, Specifically, using the 3.0deg latitude X 3.6deg longitude and 40 vertical level version of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory SKYHI GCM and six online transport schemes ranging from Eulerian through semi-Lagrangian to fully Lagrangian, it will be demonstrated that the oldest ages are obtained using the nondiffusive centered-difference schemes while the youngest ages are computed with a semi-Lagrangian transport (SLT) scheme. The centered- difference schemes are capable of producing ages older than 10 years in the mesosphere, thus eliminating the "young bias" found in previous age-of-air calculations. At this stage, only limited intuitive explanations can be advanced for this sensitivity of age-of-air calculations to the choice of advection scheme, In particular, age distributions computed online with the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Climate Model (MACCM3) using different varieties of the SLT scheme are substantially older than the SKYHI SLT distribution. The different varieties, including a noninterpolating-in-the-vertical version (which is essentially centered-difference in the vertical), also produce a narrower range of age distributions than the suite of advection schemes employed in the SKYHI model. While additional MACCM3 experiments with a wider range of schemes would be necessary to provide more definitive insights, the older and less variable MACCM3 age distributions can plausibly be interpreted as being due to the semi-implicit semi-Lagrangian dynamics employed in the MACCM3. This type of dynamical core (employed with a 60-min time step) is likely to reduce SLT's interpolation errors that are compounded by the short-term variability characteristic of the explicit centered-difference dynamics employed in the SKYHI model (time step of 3 min). In the extreme case of a very slowly varying circulation, the choice of advection scheme has no effect on two-dimensional (latitude-height) age-of-air calculations, owing to the smooth nature of the transport circulation in 2D models. These results suggest that nondiffusive schemes may be the preferred choice for multiyear simulations of tracers not overly sensitive to the requirement of monotonicity (this category includes many greenhouse gases). At the same time, age-of-air calculations offer a simple quantitative diagnostic of a scheme's long-term diffusive properties and may help in the evaluation of dynamical cores in multiyear integrations. On the other hand, the sensitivity of the computed ages to the model numerics calls for caution in using age of air as a diagnostic of a GCM's large-scale circulation field.

Eluszkiewicz, Janusz↗

High-Order Residual-Distribution Hyperbolic Advection-Diffusion Schemes: 3rd-, 4th-, and 6th-Order

In this paper, spatially high-order Residual-Distribution (RD) schemes using the first-order hyperbolic system method are proposed for general time-dependent advection-diffusion problems. The corresponding second-order time-dependent hyperbolic advection- diffusion scheme was first introduced in [NASA/TM-2014-218175, 2014], where rapid convergences over each physical time step, with typically less than five Newton iterations, were shown. In that method, the time-dependent hyperbolic advection-diffusion system (linear and nonlinear) was discretized by the second-order upwind RD scheme in a unified manner, and the system of implicit-residual-equations was solved efficiently by Newton's method over every physical time step. In this paper, two techniques for the source term discretization are proposed; 1) reformulation of the source terms with their divergence forms, and 2) correction to the trapezoidal rule for the source term discretization. Third-, fourth, and sixth-order RD schemes are then proposed with the above techniques that, relative to the second-order RD scheme, only cost the evaluation of either the first derivative or both the first and the second derivatives of the source terms. A special fourth-order RD scheme is also proposed that is even less computationally expensive than the third-order RD schemes. The second-order Jacobian formulation was used for all the proposed high-order schemes. The numerical results are then presented for both steady and time-dependent linear and nonlinear advection-diffusion problems. It is shown that these newly developed high-order RD schemes are remarkably efficient and capable of producing the solutions and the gradients to the same order of accuracy of the proposed RD schemes with rapid convergence over each physical time step, typically less than ten Newton iterations.

Mazaheri, Alireza R.↗

Continuum covariance propagation for understanding variance loss in advective systems

At the heart of modern data assimilation schemes is covariance propagation.Loss of variance experienced in large-scale applications such as numerical weather prediction is problematic, and the development of auxiliary methods to mitigate this issue is an active research area. The focus of this work is to understand the root causes of variance loss and show that for advective dynamics, the covariance propagation by itself typically causes significant, spurious loss of variance, even at full rank. To demonstrate this, we first study continuum covariance propagation by analyzing the covariance evolution equation for advective dynamics. The behavior of this evolution equation changes abruptly as the correlation length tends to zero, for example in the vicinity of sharp gradients in the advection field. This happens because the diagonal of the kernel of the covariance operator is a characteristic surface for advective dynamics. Our numerical experiments then confirm that the variance lost during numerical propagation greatly exceeds that due to numerical dissipation alone. The variance loss is driven primarily by inaccurate variance propagation resulting from standard, full-rank covariance propagation schemes, which have difficulty capturing the abrupt change in dynamics as the correlation length tends to zero. These results suggest that developing local covariance propagation methods may prove useful in ameliorating the variance loss observed in data assimilation schemes

Covariance Propagation↗

Dust-planetary boundary layer interactions amplified by entrainment and advections

Mineral dust contributes to more than half of the global aerosol loading. However, the radiative impacts of dust aerosols on planetary boundary layer (PBL) structure have not been explored sufficiently. During a typical dust storm event over Tarim Basin, dust aerosols exhibit a well-mixed distribution during the daytime in spite of a shallow layer of dust particles accumulated at higher altitudes. By contrast, nocturnal dust plumes are located near the surface due to stable stratification. We demonstrate that these differentiated vertical distributions determine the spatial heterogeneity of dust loading, radiative fluxes and PBL height variations. Dust aerosols cause daytime PBL suppression and nighttime PBL promotion through modulating surface and atmospheric radiative budgets. Specifically, dust-induced cooling effect within PBL directly inhibits the daytime PBL development. PBL suppression effect is then amplified by entrainment processes resulting in excessively low PBL height, especially for dust particles below but near the PBL top. Dust plumes weaken updrafts from PBL and downdrafts of the free atmosphere, which further reduce the entrainment mixing through attenuating horizontal and vertical advection, and eventually amplify PBL suppression. At night, near-surface dust aerosols stimulate a warm and unstable lower atmosphere, generate warm advection heating and promote the PBL development. Our study highlights the importance of specifying entrainment parameters and nighttime advection activities in quantifying the dust-PBL interactions.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Stability Analysis of Coupled Advection-Diffusion Models with Bulk Interface Condition

Numerical stability is of critical importance in general circulation models because it affects the design of algorithms, time to solution, and computational costs associated with the simulations, which are very expensive in practice. In this paper we extend the stability analysis for ocean-atmosphere coupling proposed in [Zhang et al., J. Sci. Comput. 84, 44(2020)] to a more realistic model that includes horizontal advection. We analyze various time-stepping strategies. We find that advection has a stabilizing effect in scenarios common to climate models when bulk interface condition and explicit flux coupling are used. We also show that our method can be used to study the stability impact of advection for other interface conditions such as Dirichlet-Neumann conditions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Fast Advective Water Flow through Nanochannels in Clay Interlayers: Implications for Moisture Transport in Soils and Unconventional Oil/Gas Production

Water flow in nanometer or sub-nanometer hydrophilic channels bears special importance in diverse fields of science and engineering. However, the nature of such water flow remains elusive. In this work, we report our molecular-modeling results on water flow in a sub-nanometer clay interlayer between two montmorillonite layers. We show that a fast advective flow can be induced by evaporation at one end of the interlayer channel, that is, a large suction pressure created by evaporation (~818 MPa) is able to drive the fast water flow through the channel (~0.88 m/s for a 46 Å-long channel). Scaled up for the pressure gradient to a 2 μm particle, the velocity of water is estimated to be about 95 μm/s, indicating that water can quickly flow through a μm-sized clay particle within seconds. The prediction seems to be confirmed by our thermogravimetric analysis of bentonite hydration and dehydration processes, which indicates that water transport at the early stage of the dehydration is a fast advective process, followed by a slow diffusion process. The possible occurrence of a fast advective water flow in clay interlayers prompts us to reassess water transport in a broad set of natural and engineered systems such as clay swelling/shrinking, moisture transport in soils, water uptake by plants, water imbibition/release in unconventional hydrocarbon reservoirs, and cap rock integrity of supercritical CO 2 storage.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

Evaluation of Atmospheric Boundary Layer Height From Wind Profiling Radar and Slab Models and Its Responses to Seasonality of Land Cover, Subsidence, and Advection

In this study, we evaluated the effect of land cover, atmospheric subsidence, and advection on the annual dynamics of atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) height from two contrasting sites. The first site is the Walker Branch forest, a deciduous forest of temperate climate, complex topography, and cloudy summers. The second site is the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a site of Mediterranean climate, flat terrain on a local scale, and clear summers. After testing a new algorithm to calculate ABL heights from 915 MHz radar wind profilers, we evaluated a hierarchy of three slab models to recreate the diurnal and annual patterns of ABL growth. We found that the lower ABL heights in the Delta, particularly during late summer, are driven by the combined effects of increased atmospheric subsidence and marine air advection. In both sites, the annual pattern of ABL height was strongly correlated to total daily incoming radiation, and in the Delta, the annual pattern of ABL height closely followed the seasonal patterns of sensible heat flux from a mosaic of different land covers. A land composite of latent and sensible heat fluxes obtained through a meso-network of eddy covariance measurements and the ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) mission resulted in higher model skill, thus showing that land cover heterogeneity is an important driver of ABL growth. To conclude, model simulations show that in the Delta, restoring agricultural land to wetlands with large open water areas could result in a reduction of ABL height during those months with low subsidence and advection.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Reduced-order modeling of advection-dominated systems with recurrent neural networks and convolutional autoencoders

A common strategy for the dimensionality reduction of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) relies on the use of the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) to identify a reduced subspace and the Galerkin projection for evolving dynamics in this reduced space. However, advection-dominated PDEs are represented poorly by this methodology since the process of truncation discards important interactions between higher-order modes during time evolution. In this study, we demonstrate that encoding using convolutional autoencoders (CAEs) followed by a reduced-space time evolution by recurrent neural networks overcomes this limitation effectively. We demonstrate that a truncated system of only two latent space dimensions can reproduce a sharp advecting shock profile for the viscous Burgers equation with very low viscosities, and a six-dimensional latent space can recreate the evolution of the inviscid shallow water equations. Additionally, the proposed framework is extended to a parametric reduced-order model by directly embedding parametric information into the latent space to detect trends in system evolution. Furthermore, our results show that these advection-dominated systems are more amenable to low-dimensional encoding and time evolution by a CAE and recurrent neural network combination than the POD-Galerkin technique.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Hybrid Lagrangian/Eulerian Collocated Velocity Advection and Projection Method for Fluid Simulation

Abstract We present a hybrid particle/grid approach for simulating incompressible fluids on collocated velocity grids. Our approach supports both particle‐based Lagrangian advection in very detailed regions of the flow and efficient Eulerian grid‐based advection in other regions of the flow. A novel Backward Semi‐Lagrangian method is derived to improve accuracy of grid based advection. Our approach utilizes the implicit formula associated with solutions of the inviscid Burgers’ equation. We solve this equation using Newton's method enabled by C 1 continuous grid interpolation. We enforce incompressibility over collocated, rather than staggered grids. Our projection technique is variational and designed for B‐spline interpolation over regular grids where multiquadratic interpolation is used for velocity and multilinear interpolation for pressure. Despite our use of regular grids, we extend the variational technique to allow for cut‐cell definition of irregular flow domains for both Dirichlet and free surface boundary conditions.

Gagniere, S.↗

Analysis of an Arctic cold air outbreak during autumn and related air mass transformations forced by surface changes and advection in higher altitudes

During marine cold air outbreaks (MCAOs), cold and dry Arctic air masses are transported from the central Arctic southward across the closed sea ice and much warmer open oceans. They experience significant transformations including a rapid heating and moistening, often leading to cloud formation. While intense wintertime MCAOs have been analyzed widely, the air mass transformations during other seasons have been studied sparsely. We address this gap by investigating an MCAO case observed in September 2020. To study the transformation processes, we combine the fifth generation of atmospheric reanalyses of the global climate (ERA5), trajectory calculations, as well as shipborne and airborne measurements. In the central Arctic, observations acquired from aboard the research vessel (RV) Polarstern during the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) expedition characterized the initial state of the air mass over closed sea ice. Trajectories indicated the pathway the air mass took from RV Polarstern southward to the Fram Strait. For the first 24 h of the southbound drift, the air masses remained quasi-stationary. Then, still 15 h ahead of the marginal sea ice zone, differential advection across the boundary layer flow introduced humidity and clouds at higher altitudes between 1.5 and 2.5 km. ERA5-derived temperature and humidity tendencies indicated complex vertical interactions. Radiative cloud-top cooling, entrainment, and turbulence were significantly reduced in the lower and enhanced in the upper advected cloud layer. Eventually, the lower cloud deck dissipated. After this confluence of 2 different air masses, observations gathered by Polar 5 in Fram Strait as part of the MOSAiC Airborne observations in the Central Arctic campaign revealed cloudy, moist layers throughout the lowest 3.5 km and an increasing boundary layer height. Comparing the initial with the final state 48 h later, the largest net heating of +8 K was found close to the surface, yet the largest net moistening of +2.5 g kg -1 at an altitude of 1 km, as the initial profile was exceptionally dry here. We conclude that the observed air mass transformations were driven by the surface changes from sea ice to open ocean but additionally strongly impacted by the differential advection of clouds and moisture across the near-surface MCAO flow.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Application of conservative finite-difference methods to advection problems

The possibility of applying the most recent conservative and widely applied numerical techniques in gas dynamics to problems encountered in meteorological computations is investigated. Solutions of the advection equation are obtained using conservative differencing methods. These results are compared to those obtained by differencing the advection equation directly. The comparison shows that better results are obtained when the conservative form of governing equation is used. In addition, better results are obtained with lower order conservative methods as compared with higher order differencing applied to the advection equation.

Fattahi, B.↗

Variational optimization analysis of temperature and moisture advection in a severe storm environment

Horizontal wind components, potential temperature, and mixing ratio fields associated with a severe storm environment in the south central U.S. were analyzed from synoptic upper air observations with a nonhomogeneous, anisotropic weighting function. Each data field was filtered with variational optimization analysis techniques. Variational optimization analysis was also performed on the vertical motion field and was used to produce advective forecasts of the potential temperature and mixing ratio fields. Results show that the dry intrusion is characterized by warm air, the advection of which produces a well-defined upward motion pattern. A corresponding downward motion pattern comprising a deep vertical circulation in the warm air sector of the low pressure system was detected. The axes alignment of maximum dry and warm advection with the axis of the tornado-producing squall line also resulted.

Mcfarland, M. J.↗

The prediction of sea-surface temperature variations by means of an advective mixed-layer ocean model

An advective mixed layer ocean model was developed by eliminating the assumption of horizontal homogeneity in an already existing mixed layer model, and then superimposing a mean and anomalous wind driven current field. This model is based on the principle of conservation of heat and mechanical energy and utilizes a box grid for the advective part of the calculation. Three phases of experiments were conducted: evaluation of the model's ability to account for climatological sea surface temperature (SST) variations in the cooling and heating seasons, sensitivity tests in which the effect of hypothetical anomalous winds was evaluated, and a thirty-day synoptic calculation using the model. For the case studied, the accuracy of the predictions was improved by the inclusion of advection, although nonadvective effects appear to have dominated.

Atlas, R. M.↗

Advection fog formation in a polluted atmosphere

Large quantities of atmospheric aerosols with compositions SO4(2-), NO3(-) and NH4(+) have been detected in highly industrialized areas. The major portions of aerosol products are the results of energy-related fuel combustion. Both microphysical and macrophysical processes are considered in investigating the time-dependent evolution of the saturation spectra of condensation nuclei associated with both polluted and clean atmospheres during the time periods of advection fog formation. The results show that the condensation nuclei associated with a polluted atmosphere provide more favorable conditions than condensation nuclei associated with a clean atmosphere to produce dense advection fog, and that attaining a certain degree of supersaturation is not necessarily required for the formation of advection fog with condensation nuclei associated with a polluted atmosphere for monodisperse distribution.

Hung, R. J.↗