A general method for conserving energy and potential enstrophy in shallow-water models

Abstract

The shallow-water equations may be posed in the form dF/dt - {F, H, Z}, where H is the energy, Z is the plential enstrophy, and the Nambu bracket {F, H, Z} is completely antisymmetric in its three arguments. This makes it very easy to construct numerical models that conserve analogs of the energy and potential enstrophy; one need only discretize the Nambu bracket in such a way that the antisymmetry property is maintained. Using this strategy, this paper derives explicit finite-difference approximations to the shallow-water equations that conserve mass, circulation, energy, and potential enstrophy on a regular square grid and on an unstructured triangular mesh. The latter includes the regular hexagonal grid as a special case. © 2007 American Meteorological Society.