A Fully Implicit Scheme for the Barotropic Primitive Equations

Abstract An efficient implicit finite-difference method is developed and tested for a global barotropic model. The scheme requires at each time step the solution of only one-dimensional block-tridiagonal linear systems. This additional computation is offset by the use of a time step chosen independently of the mesh spacing. The method is second-order accurate in time and fourth-order accurate in space. Our experience indicates that this implicit method is practical for numerical simulation on fine meshes.