A standard test case suite for two-dimensional linear transport on the sphere: results from a collection of state-of-the-art schemes

Recently, a standard test case suite for 2-D linear transport on the sphere was proposed to assess important aspects of accuracy in geophysical fluid dynamics with a ``minimal'' set of idealized model configurations/runs/diagnostics. Here we present results from 19 state- of-the-art transport scheme formulations based on finite- difference/finite-volume methods as well as emerging (in the context of atmospheric/oceanographic sciences) Galerkin methods. Discretization grids range from traditional regular latitude--longitude grids to more isotropic domain discretizations such as icosahedral and cubed-sphere tessellations of the sphere. The schemes are evaluated using a wide range of diagnostics in idealized flow environments. Accuracy is assessed in single- and two-tracer configurations using conventional error norms as well as novel diagnostics designed for climate and climate--chemistry applications. In addition, algorithmic considerations that may be important for computational efficiency are reported on. The latter is inevitably computing platform dependent.

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