2612 V
OLUME
130MONTHLY WEATHER REVIEW
both atmospheric (Enagonio and Montgomery 2001)
and oceanic (Nadiga et al. 1997; Milliff and McWilliams
1994) applications. Second, it provides a simple equa-
tion system that contains multiple timescales. The fastest
timescale in the shallow water equations (SWE) is as-
sociated with the gravity wave. The second timescale
of interest results from fluid advection. This is the typ-
ical timescale that is tracked by numerical methods to
ensure stability and accuracy. A third timescale exists
in our system that is the bulk motion of a vortex. The
timescale associated with the translation of the vortex
will be referred to as the dynamical timescale of the
problem and it will always be the slowest timescale in
this study. The vortex translational velocity will be set
by including a source term in the momentum equations
that represents a background wind. The fourth timescale
is associated with the Coriolis frequency and the im-
portance of resolving this timescale will be shown in
section 6.
The semi-implicit method is a popular solution meth-
od for solving the SWEs because of its stability, speed,
and accuracy (Thomas and Browning 2001). The basic
idea behind the semi-implicit method is to implicitly
solve for the effects of the gravity waves and explicitly
track the advection timescale. This method is popular
because the implicit part of the algorithm removes the
time step stability restriction based on the gravity wave
speed and replaces it with a stability limit based on the
fluid velocity (Casulli 1990; Skamarock et al. 1997).
From a stability point of view, the semi-implicit method
allows one to take much larger time steps than an ex-
plicit method.
The semi-implicit method only requires the solution
of a matrix with one unknown per control volume
(height) to advance in time a system with three un-
knowns per control volume (height, x velocity, y ve-
locity). This scalar matrix, the pressure or height matrix,
is the only implicit contribution to the solution method.
The height matrix is constructed by substituting the two
momentum equations into the continuity equation to
obtain a single equation for the fluid height. Because of
multigrid’s linear scaling, a semi-implicit method using
multigrid as the linear solver provides a fast solution
algorithm (Barros et al. 1990; Bates et al. 1990; Ruge
et al. 1995, 2000; Adams and Smolarkiewicz 2001).
However, the shallow-water equations are a nonlinear
system of equations. The main sources of nonlinearity
are from the momentum flux terms and the gradient of
potential energy term in the conservative form of the
momentum equation. Consider two distinct approaches
to solving a set of nonlinear equations. The first ap-
proach is to linearize the problem and then take time
steps small enough to keep the linearization error small.
This is effectively what is done in the semi-implicit
method. The second approach is to iterate within the
time step until the nonlinear error is small. This will be
referred to as a nonlinearly consistent solution method.
This study will compare the accuracy and efficacy (ac-
curacy as a function of work) of these two approaches
for solving the shallow-water equations.
We will briefly discuss the three main components
that have allowed Newton’s method to become a viable
option in both the solution of nonlinear systems and in
4D data assimilation (Li et al. 1994): 1) matrix-free
implementations, 2) an inexact Newton’s method, and
3) Krylov solutions of the linear problems.
A more recent version of Newton’s method, JFNK
(Brown and Saad 1990; Chan and Jackson 1984), does
not require the formation and storage of the Jacobian
matrix, which was always one of the major obstacles to
using Newton’s method. The action of the Jacobian ma-
trix can be approximated with a finite difference (Brown
and Hindmarsh 1986), similar to approximating the ac-
tion of the Hessian matrix [see Navon and Legler
(1987), Eq. (133)], used in data assimilation. Since the
Jacobian (or Hessian) matrix is not formed, this is re-
ferred to as matrix free. In both data assimilation and
nonlinear solution methods it is known that accurate
solutions of the linear problem are not required until the
nonlinear iteration is near convergence. This approach
of modifying the linear convergence tolerance is re-
ferred to as an inexact Newton method (Dembo et al.
1982) in the nonlinear solver community but it is similar
to the truncated Newton method (Nash 1984) used to
solve the large-scale unconstrained minimization prob-
lems of 4D data assimilation. Krylov solvers have been
employed by the 4D data assimilation community (Na-
von and Legler 1987) and the nonlinear solver com-
munity as an efficient method to solve the large matrices
that result from both applications. In this study we use
the generalized minimal residual (GMRES; Saad and
Schultz 1986; Saad 1996) algorithm as the Krylov meth-
od. The GMRES method is a conjugate-gradient-like
solver that is applicable to nonsymmetric matrices.
The Jacobian-free Newton–Krylov part of the ma-
chinery is well developed for both the nonlinear solution
of systems of equations and for data assimilation. How-
ever, the key to an efficient JFNK method for solving
systems of nonlinear equations is preconditioning. We
are developing a concept referred to as ‘‘physics-based’’
preconditioning (Mousseau et al. 2000; Knoll and
Mousseau 2000). The general motivation of physics-
based preconditioning is that any solution method that
provides a smooth and reasonable approximation to a
time step for the problem can be employed as a pre-
conditioner. The solution method employed as a pre-
conditioner in this manuscript is a semi-implicit tech-
nique. The height matrix required by the semi-implicit
method has only a single unknown per control volume
(compared to three unknowns per control volume in the
Jacobian matrix [h, u, and
y
]). Within our preconditioner
this matrix is approximately inverted using a simplified
multigrid method (Mousseau et al. 2000).
For clarity, we restate the new contributions contained
in the manuscript. First, an approximate modified equa-
tion analysis is used to demonstrate that time splitting