A higher-order Robert–Asselin type time filter

The Robert–Asselin (RA) time filter combined with leapfrog scheme is widely used in numerical models of weather and climate. It successfully suppresses the spurious computational mode associated with the leapfrog method, but it also weakly dampens the physical mode and degrades the numerical accuracy. The Robert–Asselin–Williams (RAW) time filter is a modification of the RA filter that reduces the undesired numerical damping of RA filter and increases the accuracy. We propose a higher-order Robert–Asselin (hoRA) type time filter which effectively suppresses the computational modes and achieves third-order accuracy with the same storage requirement as RAW filter. Like RA and RAW filters, the hoRA filter is non-intrusive, and so it would be easily implementable. The leapfrog scheme with hoRA filter is almost as accurate, stable and efficient as the intrusive third-order Adams–Bashforth (AB3) method.