A Modified Characteristic Finite Element Method for a Fully Nonlinear Formulation of the Semigeostrophic Flow Equations

This paper develops a fully discrete modified characteristic finite element method for a coupled system consisting of the fully nonlinear Monge–Ampère equation and a transport equation. The system is the Eulerian formulation in the dual space for B. J. Hoskins’ semigeostrophic flow equations, which are widely used in meteorology to model frontogenesis. To overcome the difficulty caused by the strong nonlinearity, we first formulate (at the differential level) a vanishing moment approximation of the semigeostrophic flow equations, a methodology recently proposed by the authors [17, 18], which involves approximating the fully nonlinear Monge–Ampère equation by a family of fourth-order quasilinear equations. We then construct a fully discrete modified characteristic finite element method for the regularized problem. It is shown that under certain mesh constraint, the proposed numerical method converges with an optimal order rate of convergence. In particular, the obtained error bounds show explicit dependence on the regularization parameter ε. Numerical tests are also presented to validate the theoretical results and to gauge the efficiency of the proposed fully discrete modified characteristic finite element method.