A nodal triangle-based spectral element method for the shallow water equations on the sphere

A nodal triangle-based spectral element (SE) method for the shallow water equations on the sphere is presented. The original SE method uses quadrilateral elements and high-order nodal Lagrange polynomials, constructed from a tensor-product of the Legendre–Gauss–Lobatto points. In this work, we construct the high-order Lagrange polynomials directly on the triangle using nodal sets obtained from the electrostatics principle [J.S. Hesthaven, From electrostatics to almost optimal nodal sets for polynomial interpolation in a simplex, SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis 35 (1998) 655–676] and Fekete points [M.A. Taylor, B.A. Wingate, R.E. Vincent, An algorithm for computing Fekete points in the triangle, SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis 38 (2000) 1707–1720]. These points have good approximation properties and far better Lebesgue constants than any other nodal set derived for the triangle. By employing triangular elements as the basic building-blocks of the SE method and the Cartesian coordinate form of the equations, we can use any grid imaginable including adaptive unstructured grids. Results for six test cases are presented to confirm the accuracy and stability of the method. The results show that the triangle-based SE method yields the expected exponential convergence and that it can be more accurate than the quadrilateral-based SE method even while using 30–60% fewer grid points especially when adaptive grids are used to align the grid with the flow direction. However, at the moment, the quadrilateral-based SE method is twice as fast as the triangle-based SE method because the latter does not yield a diagonal mass matrix.