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Abstract

A discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element formulation is proposed for the solution of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations for a vertically stratified fluid, which are of interest in mesoscale nonhydrostatic atmospheric modeling. The resulting scheme naturally ensures conservation of mass, momentum, and energy. A semi-implicit time-integration approach is adopted to improve the efficiency of the scheme with respect to the explicit Runge-Kutta time integration strategies usually employed in the context of DG formulations. A method is also presented to reformulate the resulting linear system as a pseudo-Helmholtz problem. In doing this, we obtain a DG discretization closely related to those proposed for the solution of elliptic problems, and we show how to take advantage of the numerical integration rules (required in all DG methods for the area and flux integrals) to increase the efficiency of the solution algorithm. The resulting numerical formulation is then validated on a collection of classical two-dimensional test cases, including density driven flows and mountain wave simulations. The performance analysis shows that the semi-implicit method is, indeed, superior to explicit methods and that the pseudo-Helmholtz formulation yields further efficiency improvements.