Particle trajectory calculations with a two‐step three‐time level semi‐Lagrangian scheme well suited for curved flows

This study proposes a new two‐step three‐time level semi‐Lagrangian scheme for calculation of particle trajectories. The scheme is intended to yield accurate determination of the particle departure position, particularly in the presence of significant flow curvature. Experiments were performed both for linear and non‐linear idealized advection problems, with different flow curvatures. Results for simulations with the proposed scheme, and with three other semi‐Lagrangian schemes, and with an Eulerian method are presented. In the linear advection problem the two‐step three‐time level scheme produced smaller root mean square errors and more accurate replication of the angular displacement of a Gaussian hill than the other schemes. In the non‐linear advection experiments the proposed scheme produced, in general, equal or better conservation of domain‐averaged quantities than the other semi‐Lagrangian schemes, especially at large Courant numbers. In idealized frontogenesis simulations the scheme performed equally or better than the other schemes in the representation of sharp gradients in a scalar field. The two‐step three‐time level scheme has some computational overhead as compared with the other three semi‐Lagrangian schemes. Nevertheless, the additional computational effort was shown to be worthwhile, due to the accuracy obtained by the scheme in the experiments with large time steps. The most remarkable feature of the scheme is its robustness, since it performs well both for small and large Courant numbers, in the presence of weak as well strong flow curvatures. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.