A spectral finite volume transport scheme on the cubed-sphere Original Research Article

Advective processes are of central importance in many applications and their treatment is crucial in the numerical modelling of the transport of trace constituents in atmospheric models. High-order numerical methods offer the promise of accurately capturing these advective processes in atmospheric flows and have been shown to efficiently scale to large numbers of processors. In this paper, a conservative transport scheme based on the nodal high-order spectral finite volume method is developed for the cubed-sphere. A third-order explicit strong stability preserving scheme is employed for the time integration. The reconstruction procedure which we developed avoids the (expensive) calculation of the inverse of the reconstruction matrix. Flux-corrected transport algorithm is implemented to enforce monotonicity in the two-dimensional transport scheme. Two standard advection tests, a solid-body rotation and a deformational flow, were performed to evaluate the spectral finite volume method optionally combined with a flux-corrected transport scheme. Spectral accuracy in space is demonstrated with a linear wave equation.