Numerical Testing of a New Positivity-Preserving Interpolation Algorithm

Abstract: An important component of a number of computational modeling algorithms is an interpolation method that preserves the positivity of the function being interpolated. This report describes the numerical testing of a new positivity-preserving algorithm that is designed to be used when interpolating from a solution defined on one grid to different spatial grid. The motivating application for this work was a numerical weather prediction (NWP) code that uses a spectral element mesh discretization for its dynamics core and a cartesian tensor product mesh for the evaluation of its physics routines. This coupling of spectral element mesh, which uses nonuniformly spaced quadrature/collocation points, and uniformly-spaced cartesian mesh combined with the desire to maintain positivity when moving between these meshes necessitates our work. This new approach is evaluated against several typical algorithms in use on a range of test problems in one or more space dimensions. The results obtained show that the new method is competitive in terms of observed accuracy while at the same time preserving the underlying positivity of the functions being interpolated.