Modeling and Stabilization of Transport-Dominated Flows

Abstract

This report explores and compares numerical stabilization methods for transport-dominated flows arising in atmospheric modeling. The Streamline-Upwind (SU) and Streamline-Upwind Petrov-Galerkin (SUPG) stabilization formulations are implemented in Julia's ClimaCore.jl package and Python's Firedrake package for a test problem with slotted-cylinder initial conditions. These methods are compared for their ability to mitigate spurious oscillations while preserving sharp features against existing hyperdiffusion and quasi-monotone limiter methods, alongside various combinations. For this benchmark, quasi-monotone limiters were most effective at minimizing un-physical extrema, at the expense of diffusing the overall structure. The SUPG method was not found to improve upon the no stabilization case, for this test case in the computed error metrics. However, it performs best at preserving sharp feature and overall structure, among tested stabilized runs. Theoretical properties of SUPG are analyzed, and an asymptotics-based SUPG algorithm is proposed as future work.