Accurate representation of geostrophic and hydrostatic balance in unstructured mesh finite element ocean modelling

Abstract Accurate representation of geostrophic and hydrostatic balance is an essential requirement for numerical modelling of geophysical flows. Potentially, unstructured mesh numerical methods offer significant benefits over conventional structured meshes, including the ability to conform to arbitrary bounding topography in a natural manner and the ability to apply dynamic mesh adaptivity. However, there is a need to develop robust schemes with accurate representation of physical balance on arbitrary unstructured meshes. We discuss the origin of physical balance errors in a finite element discretisation of the Navier–Stokes equations using the fractional timestep pressure projection method. By considering the Helmholtz decomposition of forcing terms in the momentum equation, it is shown that the components of the buoyancy and Coriolis accelerations that project onto the non-divergent velocity tendency are the small residuals between two terms of comparable magnitude. Hence there is a potential for significant injection of imbalance by a numerical method that does not compute these residuals accurately. This observation is used to motivate a balanced pressure decomposition method whereby an additional “balanced pressure” field, associated with buoyancy and Coriolis accelerations, is solved for at increased accuracy and used to precondition the solution for the dynamical pressure. The utility of this approach is quantified in a fully non-linear system in exact geostrophic balance. The approach is further tested via quantitative comparison of unstructured mesh simulations of the thermally driven rotating annulus against laboratory data. Using a piecewise linear discretisation for velocity and pressure (a stabilised P1P1 discretisation), it is demonstrated that the balanced pressure decomposition method is required for a physically realistic representation of the system.