A promising development of the last decade in the numerical modelling of geophysical
fluids has been the compatible finite element framework. Indeed, this will form the basis for
the next-generation dynamical core of the Met Office. For this framework to be useful for
numerical weather prediction models, it must be able to handle ...
A promising development of the last decade in the numerical modelling of geophysical
fluids has been the compatible finite element framework. Indeed, this will form the basis for
the next-generation dynamical core of the Met Office. For this framework to be useful for
numerical weather prediction models, it must be able to handle descriptions of unresolved
and diabatic processes. These processes offer a challenging test for any numerical discretisation,
and have not yet been described within the compatible finite element framework.
The main contribution of this paper is to extend a discretisation using this new framework to include
moist thermodynamics. Our results demonstrate that discretisations within
the compatible finite element framework can be robust enough to also describe moist atmospheric processes.
We describe our discretisation strategy, including treatment of moist processes, and present
two configurations of the model using different sets of function spaces with different degrees
of finite element. The performance of the model is demonstrated through several test cases.
Two of these test cases are new cloudy-atmosphere variants of existing test cases: inertia
gravity waves in a two-dimensional vertical slice and a three-dimensional rising thermal.