THE LOCAL SPLINE VERTICAL INTERPOLATION METHOD OF TEMPERATURE AND GEOPOTENTIAL HEIGHT FIELDS AND THE TIME-DEPENDENT DIFFERENCE FORM OF THE HYDROSTATIC EQUATION

In numerical weather prediction (NWP), the accuracy of vertical interpolation of the initial data is a problem which is greatly concerned by people. In this paper, we specify vertical distributions of the temperature and the geopotential height fields and examine three interpolation methods, i.e. the Lagrangian polynomial inter-polation method (hereafter abbreviated to LP method), the linear interpolation method (LN method) and the local spline interpolation method (LS method) proposed by the author. The examination shows that when the vertical resolution of the initial data is high enough, for example, the number of the given data levels N is 10 or more, all the three methods get good accuracy of interpolation, especially, the LP and the LS methods have very little errors almost tending to zero, while the LN method has a little larger errors than the two formers and the errors at various levels have the same sign. When N is reduced to 5, the LP and the LS methods still have quite good accuracy and similar error distributions, while the LN method has less accuracy. If the geopo-tential height field needs to be adjusted in order to satisfy the hydrostatic equilibrium with the temperature field which is assumed fixed, then the LS method has minimum errors. The examination also indicates that the vertical resolution with at least 5 levels of initial data can keep the interpolation accuracy. Otherwise the accuracy will not be guaranteed no matter which method is used.It is also pointed out in this paper that the temperature and the geopotential height fields can be given inde-pendently in numerical prediction models in order to keep higher interpolation accuracy. However, the hydro-static equation should be finite differenced in other way which is somewhat different from the conventional one. In other words, the time dependent difference form of the equation should be used, so that the initial interpola-tion accuracy could have influence on the time integration.