A comparative study of explicit differential operators on arbitrary grids

We compare explicit differential operators for unstructured grids and their accuracy with the aim of solving time-dependent partial differential equations in geophysical applications. As many problems suggest the use of staggered grids we investigate different schemes for the calculation of space derivatives on two separate grids. The differential operators are explicit and local in the sense that they use only information of the function in their nearest neighborhood, so that no matrix inversion is necessary. This makes this approach well-suited for parallelization. Differential weights are obtained either with the finite-volume method or using natural neighbor coordinates. Unstructured grids have advantages concerning the simulation of complex geometries and boundaries. Our results show that while in general triangular (hexagonal) grids perform worse than standard finite-difference approaches, the effects of grid irregularities on the accuracy of the space derivatives are comparably small for realistic grids. This suggests that such a finite-difference-like approach to unstructured grids may be an alternative to other irregular grid methods such as the finite-element technique.