SUMMARY
Advection errors are common in basic terrain-following (TF) coordinates. Numerous methods, including the hybrid TF coordinate and smoothing vertical layers, have been proposed to reduce the advection errors. Advection errors are affected by the directions of velocity fields and the complexity of the terrain. In this study, an unstructured adaptive mesh together with the discontinuous Galerkin finite element method is employed to reduce advection errors over steep terrains. To test the capability of adaptive meshes, five two-dimensional (2D) idealized tests are conducted. Then, the results of adaptive meshes are compared with those of cut-cell and TF meshes. The results show that using adaptive meshes reduces the advection errors by one to two orders of magnitude compared to the cut-cell and TF meshes regardless of variations in velocity directions or terrain complexity. Furthermore, adaptive meshes can reduce the advection errors when the tracer moves tangentially along the terrain surface and allows the terrain to be represented without incurring in severe dispersion. Finally, the computational cost is analyzed. To achieve a given tagging criterion level, the adaptive mesh requires fewer nodes, smaller minimum mesh sizes, less runtime and lower proportion between the node numbers used for resolving the tracer and each wavelength than cut-cell and TF meshes, thus reducing the computational costs.