Limited-area atmospheric modeling using an unstructured mesh

A regional configuration of the atmospheric component of the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS-A) is described and evaluated. It employs horizontally unstructured spherical centroidal Voronoi meshes (nominally hexagonal), and lateral boundary conditions used in rectangular grid regional models are adapted to the MPAS-A Voronoi mesh discretization. Test results using a perfect-model assumption show that the lateral boundary conditions are stable and robust. As found in other regional modeling studies, configurations using larger regional domains generally have smaller solution errors compared to configurations employing smaller regional domains. MPAS-A supports variable-resolution meshes, and when regional domains are expanded to include a coarser outer mesh, the variable-resolution configurations recover most of the error reduction compared to a configuration using uniform high resolution, and at much-reduced cost. The wider relaxation-zone region of the variable-resolution mesh also helps reconcile differences near the lateral boundary that evolve between the regional model solution and the driving solution, and the configuration is more stable than one using a uniform high-resolution regional mesh. At convection-permitting resolution, solutions produced using global variable-resolution MPAS-A configurations have smaller solution errors than the regional configurations after about 48 h.