On the use of discrete adjoints in goal error estimation for shallow water equations

Abstract

Goal oriented dual weight error estimation has been used in context of computational fluid dynamics for several years. The adaptation of this method to geophysical models is the subject of this paper. A differentiation-enabled prototype of the NAG Fortran compiler is used to generate a discrete adjoint version of such a geophysical model and allows to compute the required goal sensitivities. Numerical results are presented for a shallow water configuration of the Icosahedral Non-hydrostatic General Circulation Model (ICON). A special treatment of the underlying linear solver is discussed yielding improved scalability of this approach and a significant reduction in memory consumption and runtime.