Spectral Preconditioners for Nonhydrostatic Atmospheric Models

Abstract The elliptic problems in semi-implicit nonhydrostatic atmospheric models are difficult. Typically, they are poorly conditioned, nonseparable, contain cross-derivative terms, and are often nonsymmetric. Here, the resulting linear system is solved using a preconditioned Krylov subspace method—the generalized conjugate residual (GCR) algorithm. A horizontal spectral preconditioner is developed as an alternative to a more standard and much simpler line Jacobi relaxation scheme. However, the efficacy of the spectral preconditioner requires neglecting the cross-derivative terms and homogenization (e.g., averaging) metric coefficients over the computational domain. Because such a compromise causes a substantial departure of the preconditioner from the original elliptic operator, it is not obvious a priori whether it leads to a competitive solver. The robustness of the proposed approach over a broad range of representative meteorological applications is evaluated, in the context of a three-time-level sem...

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