Interpolation on spherical geodesic grids: a comparative study

Most operational models in atmospheric physics, meteorology and climatology nowadays adopt spherical geodesic grids and require “ad hoc” developed interpolation procedures. The author does a comparison between chosen representatives of linear, distance-based and cubic interpolation schemes outlining their advantages and drawbacks in this specific application field. Numerical experiments on a standard test problem, while confirming a good performance of linear and distance-based schemes in a single interpolation step, also show their minor accuracy with respect to the cubic scheme in the more realistic simulation of advection of a meteorological field.