A fully implicit scheme for the barotropic primitive equations

An efficient implicit finite-difference method is developed and tested for a global barotropic model. The scheme requires, at each time step, the solution of only one-dimensional block-tridiagonal linear systems. This additional computation is offset by the use of a time step chosen independently of the mesh spacing. The method is second-order accurate in time and fourth-order accurate in space. Present experience indicates that this implicit method is practical for numerical simulation on fine meshes.