An upwind-biased transport scheme using a quadratic reconstruction on spherical icosahedral grids

The simplest one among them uses an algorithm where the tracer distribution in the upwind side of a cell face is reconstructed using a linear surface. Recently, it was demonstrated that using second- or fourth-order reconstructions instead of the linear one produces better results.

The computational cost of the second-order reconstruction method was not much larger than the linear one, while that of the fourth-order one was significantly larger. In this work, the authors propose another second-order reconstruction scheme on the spherical icosahedral grids, motivated by some ideas from the piecewise parabolic method. The second-order profile of a tracer is reconstructed under two constraints: (i) the area integral of the profile is equal to the cell-averaged value times the cell area and (ii) the profile is the least squares fit to the cell-vertex values.