Multiscale mesh generation on the sphere

A method for generating computational meshes for applications in ocean modeling is presented. The method uses a standard engineering approach for describing the geometry of the domain that requires meshing. The underlying sphere is parametrized using stereographic coordinates. Then, coastlines are described with cubic splines drawn in the stereographic parametric space. The mesh generation algorithm builds the mesh in the parametric plane using available techniques. The method enables to import coastlines from different data sets and, consequently, to build meshes of domains with highly variable length scales. The results include meshes together with numerical simulations of various kinds.