Two Conservative, High-Order Coupling Methods for Fluid-Fluid Interaction
The distribution of energy across space and time scales is quite different between the atmosphere and ocean. Therefore, codes for air-sea interaction are constructed by coupling together atmosphere and ocean components, each highly optimized internally using different numerical methods, by passing fluxes of conserved quantities between the components in the form of boundary conditions at the air-sea interface. For efficiency, the fluxes are usually asynchronous, meaning they are calculated using data extrapolated from previous times for at least one component.