Towards Building the OP-Mapped WENO Schemes: A General Methodology

A serious and ubiquitous issue in existing mapped WENO schemes is that most of them can hardly preserve high resolutions, but in the meantime prevent spurious oscillations in the solving of hyperbolic conservation laws with long output times. Our goal for this article was to address this widely known problem. In our previous work, the order-preserving (OP) criterion was originally introduced and carefully used to devise a new mapped WENO scheme that performs satisfactorily in long simulations, and hence it was indicated that the OP criterion plays a critical role in the maintenance of low-dissipation and robustness for mapped WENO schemes. Thus, in our present work, we firstly defined the family of mapped WENO schemes, whose mappings meet the OP criterion, as OP-Mapped WENO. Next, we attentively took a closer look at the mappings of various existing mapped WENO schemes and devised a general formula for them. That helped us to extend the OP criterion to the design of improved mappings. Then, we created a generalized implementation of obtaining a group of OP-Mapped WENO schemes, named MOP-WENO-X, as they are developed from the existing mapped WENO-X schemes, where the notation “X” is used to identify the version of the existing mapped WENO scheme. Finally, extensive numerical experiments and comparisons with competing schemes were conducted to demonstrate the enhanced performances of the MOP-WENO-X schemes.

The Influence of WENO Schemes on Large-Eddy Simulations of a Neutral Atmospheric Boundary Layer

This work explores the influence of Weighted Essentially Non-Oscillatory (WENO) schemes on Cloud Model 1 (CM1) large-eddy simulations (LES) of a quasi-steady, horizontally homogeneous, fully developed, neutral atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). An advantage of applying WENO schemes to scalar advection in compressible models is the elimination of acoustic waves and associated oscillations of domain-total vertical velocity. Applying WENO schemes to momentum advection in addition to scalar advection yields no further advantage, but has an adverse effect on resolved turbulence within LES. As a tool designed to reduce numerically generated spurious oscillations, WENO schemes also suppress physically realistic instability development in turbulence-resolving simulations. Thus, applying WENO schemes to momentum advection reduces vortex stretching, suppresses the energy cascade, reduces shear-production of resolved Reynolds stress, and eventually amplifies the differences between the surface-layer mean wind profiles in the LES and the mean wind profiles expected in accordance with the filtered law of the wall (LOTW). The role of WENO schemes in adversely influencing surface-layer turbulence has inspired a concept of anti-WENO (AWENO) schemes to enhance instability development in regions where energy-containing turbulent motions are inadequately resolved by LES grids. The success in reproducing the filtered LOTW via AWENO schemes suggests that improving advection schemes is a critical component toward faithfully simulating near-surface turbulence and dealing with other "Terra Incognita" problems.