Strong and Auxiliary Forms of the Semi-Lagrangian Method for Incompressible Flows

We present a review of the semi-Lagrangian method for advection-diffusion and incompressible Navier-Stokes equations discretized with high-order methods. In particular, we compare the strong form where the departure points are computed directly via backwards integration with the auxiliary form where an auxiliary advection equation is solved instead; the latter is also referred to as Operator Integration Factor Splitting (OIFS) scheme. For intermediate size of time steps the auxiliary form is preferrable but for large time steps only the strong form is stable. Corresponding author, [email protected]