A non-column based, fully unstructured implementation of Kessler's
microphysics with warm rain using continuous and discontinuous spectral
elements
Abstract
Numerical weather prediction is pushing the envelope of grid resolution
at local and global scales alike. Aiming to model topography with higher
precision, a handful of articles introduced unstructured vertical grids
and tested them for dry atmospheres. The next step towards effective
high-resolution unstructured grids for atmospheric modeling requires
that also microphysics is independent of any vertical columns, in
contrast to what is ubiquitous across operational and research models.
In this paper, we present a non-column based continuous and
discontinuous spectral element implementation of Kessler’s microphysics
with warm rain as a first step towards fully unstructured atmospheric
models.
We test the proposed algorithm against standard three-dimensional
benchmarks for precipitating clouds and show that the results are
comparable with those presented in the literature across all of the
tested effective resolutions. While presented for both continuous and
discontinuous spectral elements in this paper, the method that we
propose can very easily be adapted to any numerical method utilized in
other research and legacy codes.