An energy and potential enstrophy conserving numerical scheme for the multi-layer shallow water equations with complete Coriolis force

• Hamiltonian-derived scheme exactly conserves energy and potential enstrophy.
• Energy/enstrophy conserved at machine accuracy for sufficiently small time step.
• Can be used to incorporate full Coriolis force into existing isopycnal models.

We present an energy- and potential enstrophy-conserving scheme for the non-traditional shallow water equations that include the complete Coriolis force and topography. These integral conservation properties follow from material conservation of potential vorticity in the continuous shallow water equations. The latter property cannot be preserved by a discretisation on a fixed Eulerian grid, but exact conservation of a discrete energy and a discrete potential enstrophy seems to be an effective substitute that prevents any distortion of the forward and inverse cascades in quasi-two dimensional turbulence through spurious sources and sinks of energy and potential enstrophy, and also increases the robustness of the scheme against nonlinear instabilities. We exploit the existing Arakawa–Lamb scheme for the traditional shallow water equations, reformulated by Salmon as a discretisation of the Hamiltonian and Poisson bracket for this system. The non-rotating, traditional, and our non-traditional shallow water equations all share the same continuous Hamiltonian structure and Poisson bracket, provided one distinguishes between the particle velocity and the canonical momentum per unit mass. We have determined a suitable discretisation of the non-traditional canonical momentum, which includes additional coupling between the layer thickness and velocity fields, and modified the discrete kinetic energy to suppress an internal symmetric computational instability that otherwise arises for multiple layers. The resulting scheme exhibits the expected second-order convergence under spatial grid refinement. We also show that the drifts in the discrete total energy and potential enstrophy due to temporal truncation error may be reduced to machine precision under suitable refinement of the timestep using the third-order Adams–Bashforth or fourth-order Runge–Kutta integration schemes.