An IMEX-DG solver with non-conforming mesh refinement for atmospheric dynamics with rotation

Abstract

We present a high-order implicit-explicit discontinuous Galerkin (IMEX-DG) solver for the compressible Euler equations to account for rotational effects within a fully compressible atmospheric framework. Time integration follows a second-order additive Runge-Kutta scheme, treating stiff acoustic modes implicitly and advective terms explicitly. The solver is built on the deal.II finite element library, combining matrix-free operator evaluation, adaptive non-conforming meshes capabilities, and distributed-memory parallelism. Two alternative treatments of the rotational and gravitational source terms within the solution strategy, based on nonlinear fixed-point iterations, are introduced and compared in terms of accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency. A discrete analysis of the rotational operator is also carried out in order to derive a formulation suitable for efficient matrix-free implementation and to avoid inconsistent naive discretisations. The proposed formulation is validated through convergence studies on rotating inertia-gravity wave benchmarks and further assessed in fully three-dimensional simulations of stratified flow over orography on both uniform and adaptive meshes. The numerical results show that the rotating IMEX-DG framework has the expected accuracy and stability properties while correctly capturing the asymmetry and wave structures induced by rotation in large-scale atmospheric flows.