The Euler equation of quasi-geostrophic fluids and volume preserving numerical methods

Abstract: We consider the Euler equation of quasi-geostrophic fluids which is widely used in weather forecast. Our goal is to study explicit volume-preserving numerical methods for very long simulations on an energy and enstrophy preserving discretization. To this purpose, we compute the average fields and estimate statistical parameters. It is observed that the statistical parameters depend on the integrals of the discretization and that the computed parameters are affected by the error in those, even if the volume of the phase space is correctly preserved. We conclude that monitoring the error in the integrals by the explicit volume preserving method can be used as an indication of how good the estimated parameters are.