A comparison of variational upwinding schemes for geophysical fluids, and their application to potential enstrophy conserving discretisations

Methods for stabilising the turbulent cascade of potential enstrophy are analysed and compared for a compatible finite element discretisation of the rotating shallow water equations. These different approaches to upwinding the potential vorticity include the well-known anticipated potential vorticity method (APVM), streamwise upwind Petrov-Galerkin (SUPG) method, and a more recent method where the trial functions are evaluated downstream within the reference element. In all cases the upwinding scheme conserves both potential vorticity and energy, since the antisymmetric structure of the equations is preserved. The APVM leads to a symmetric definite correction to the potential enstrophy that is dissipative and inconsistent. The SUPG scheme introduces a consistent correction to the APVM scheme that acts as a backscatter term ensuring a richer depiction of turbulent dynamics. The downwinded trial function formulation results in the advection of downwind corrections, which analysis and numerical experiments show to be quantitatively similar to the SUPG scheme for a turbulent shear flow. The main difference between the SUPG and downwinded trial function schemes is in the energy conservation and residual errors. If just two nonlinear iterations are applied then the energy conservation errors are improved for the downwinded trial function formulation, reflecting a smaller residual error than for the SUPG scheme. We also present new temporal formulations by which potential enstrophy is exactly integrated across each time level. Results using these formulations are observed to be stable in the absence of any dissipation, despite the aliasing of grid scale turbulence. Using such a formulation and the APVM with a coefficient O(100) times smaller that its regular value leads to turbulent spectra that are greatly improved at the grid scale over the SUPG and downwinded trial function formulations with unstable potential enstrophy errors.