Quantification of spurious dissipation and mixing – Discrete variance decay in a Finite-Volume framework

It is well known that in numerical models the advective transport relative to fixed or moving grids needs to be discretised with sufficient accuracy to minimise the spurious decay of tracer variance (spurious mixing). In this paper a general analysis of discrete variance decay (DVD) caused by advective and diffusive fluxes is established. Lacking a general closed derivation for the local DVD rate, two non-invasive methods to estimate local DVD during model runtime are discussed. Whereas the first was presented recently by Burchard and Rennau (2008), the second is a newly proposed alternative. This alternative analysis method is argued to have a more consistent foundation. In particular, it recovers a physically sound definition of discrete variance in a Finite-Volume cell. The diagnosed DVD can be separated into physical and numerical (spurious) contributions, with the latter originating from discretisation errors. Based on the DVD analysis, a 3D dissipation analysis is developed to quantify the physically and numerically induced loss of kinetic energy. This dissipation analysis provides a missing piece of information to assess the discrete energy conservation of an ocean model. Analyses are performed and evaluated for three test cases, with complexities ranging from idealised 1D advection to a realistic ocean modelling application to the Western Baltic Sea. In all test cases the proposed alternative DVD analysis method is demonstrated to provide a reliable diagnostic tool for the local quantification of physically and numerically induced dissipation and mixing.