Voronoi-based finite volume methods, optimal Voronoi meshes, and PDEs on the sphere. (Q1420963)

The authors explain the concept of Voronoi meshes on the sphere and propose a finite volume discretization scheme for partial differential equations (PDEs) posed on the sphere. They prove that the scheme is first order accurate with respect to a mesh-dependent discrete first-derivative norm for the model convection-diffusion problem on the sphere: \[ \nabla_s\cdot (-a(x)\nabla_s u(x) + \vec{v}(x) u (x)) + b(x) u(x) = f(x)\quad \text{for}\;x\in S^2, \] where \(S^2\) is the sphere of radius \(r>0\) in \(\mathbb{R}^3\). Note that, since \(S^2\) has no boundary, no boundary conditions need to be imposed. They introduce the notion of constrained centroidal Voronoi tessellations (CCVTs) of the sphere and illustrate the high-quality uniform and non-uniform meshes that are included in this special class of Voronoi meshes. Computational experiments illustrate the performance of the CCVT meshes used in conjunction with the finite volume scheme for the solution of simple model PDEs on the sphere. The experiments show that the approximations are second order accurate if errors are measured in discrete \(L^2\) norms.