An isotropic recovery-based error estimator algorithm for mesh adaptation in a finite volume environment with application to atmospheric flows

Abstract

We develop an Isotropic Recovery-based Error Estimator (IREE) to drive mesh adaptation within a finite volume framework. Recovery-based error estimators are widely used in practice thanks to their simplicity, relying solely on the available discrete solution and a suitable post-processing step. While recovery-based estimators are well established in the finite element framework, their application to finite volume methods, despite the widespread use of the latter in industrial and commercial codes, remains largely unexplored and motivates the present study. We assess the performance of the proposed IREE-driven mesh adaptation procedure through well-known benchmarks for dry atmospheric flows modeling and compare it against a widely-used plain mesh adaptation algorithm. Both qualitative and quantitative results show that the IREE algorithm is more effective at suppressing numerical instabilities compared with the plain approach and, for most of the simulation time, provides a superior accuracy, though at a moderately higher computational cost. In addition, both the adaptive approaches offer substantial computational savings (between 35% and 94%) relative to simulations based on fixed uniformly fine meshes. These findings demonstrate that IREE-based mesh adaptation is a promising and effective strategy for atmospheric flow simulations and has the potential to substantially reduce the computational effort of generating reanalysis-quality data.