A scale-invariant formulation of the anticipated potential vorticity method

Abstract

The long-term success of climate models that operate on multi-resolution grids will depend on access to subgrid parameterizations that act appropriately across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. As the first step in a series of efforts to obtain such scale-aware subgrid parametrizations, in this article we focus on the anticipated potential vorticity method (APVM) on quasi-uniform grids with varying resolutions. By a scale analysis technique and the phenomenological theories for two-dimensional turbulent flows, we derive a new formulation of the APVM, which depends on a single parameter that is, in principle, invariant with respect to the time step size, the grid resolution and the flow itself. Results of numerical experiments with this new formulation demonstrate that the optimal parameter of the APVM is invariant with respect to the time step size, insensitive to the flows, and is only weakly dependent on the grid resolution.