Prediction-step staggered-in-time FDTD: An efficient numerical scheme to solve the linearised equations of fluid dynamics in outdoor sound propagation

The finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method to solve the linearised equations of fluid dynamics has shown to be very powerful and useful in outdoor sound propagation. Practical applications are however limited due to the large need for computational resources. The numerical discretisation influences computational efficiency to an important degree. In this paper, some possible ways to discretise temporal derivatives are studied. Two obvious ways of time-discretisation namely staggered-in-time (SIT) and a simple collocated-in-time (CIT) scheme are compared to the prediction-step staggered-in-time (PSIT) scheme. The latter is intended to be used for the calculation of sound propagation in the typical low wind speeds encountered in the outdoor environment at low heights above the earth’s surface. It was shown that the PSIT scheme is more stable than the SIT scheme, so practical calculations are possible. Computational efficiency is increased to an important degree compared to the CIT scheme. The numerical accuracy (more precisely the amplitude error) of the PSIT scheme is an important improvement upon SIT. The CIT scheme on the other hand conserves amplitude better. The amplitude error becomes larger with increasing wind speed because of some simplifications during the numerical discretisation. In low wind speeds, the PSIT algorithm can serve as an interesting compromise between numerical accuracy and the required amount of computing power.