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Title: Correcting transport errors during advection of aerosol and cloud moment sequences in eulerian models

Book ·
OSTI ID:1043387

Moment methods are finding increasing usage for simulations of particle population balance in box models and in more complex flows including two-phase flows. These highly efficient methods have nevertheless had little impact to date for multi-moment representation of aerosols and clouds in atmospheric models. There are evidently two reasons for this: First, atmospheric models, especially if the goal is to simulate climate, tend to be extremely complex and take many man-years to develop. Thus there is considerable inertia to the implementation of novel approaches. Second, and more fundamental, the nonlinear transport algorithms designed to reduce numerical diffusion during advection of various species (tracers) from cell to cell, in the typically coarse grid arrays of these models, can and occasionally do fail to preserve correlations between the moments. Other correlated tracers such as isotopic abundances, composition of aerosol mixtures, hydrometeor phase, etc., are subject to this same fate. In the case of moments, this loss of correlation can and occasionally does give rise to unphysical moment sets. When this happens the simulation can come to a halt. Following a brief description and review of moment methods, the goal of this paper is to present two new approaches that both test moment sequences for validity and correct them when they fail. The new approaches work on individual grid cells without requiring stored information from previous time-steps or neighboring cells.

Research Organization:
Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE SC OFFICE OF SCIENCE (SC)
DOE Contract Number:
DE-AC02-98CH10886
OSTI ID:
1043387
Report Number(s):
BNL-96992-2012-BC; R&D Project: 2012-EE630EECA-BUDG; KP1701000; TRN: US201213%%337
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English