Atmospheric and ocean modeling with an adaptive finite element solver for the shallow-water equations

A new computational method for solving the shallow-water equations has been developed. This method combines some of the recent developments of geophysical and computational fluid dynamics, like a semi-Lagrangian advection scheme, an adaptive mesh refinement based on a posteriori error estimation, parallelization on a local memory parallel computer, and iterative solution of the linear system derived from a finite element discretization. Dynamic load balancing has been applied in order to achieve high parallel efficiency. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.