Abstract. A newly developed advection scheme, the Hybrid Eulerian Lagrangian (HEL) scheme, has been tested, including a module for atmospheric chemistry, including 58 chemical species, and compared to two other traditional advection schemes; a classical pseudospectral Eulerian method the Accurate Space Derivative (ASD) scheme and the bi-cubic semi-Lagrangian (SL) scheme using classical rotation tests. The rotation tests have been designed to test and compare the advection schemes for different spatial and temporal resolutions in different chemical conditions (rural and urban) and for different shapes (cone and slotted cylinder) giving the advection schemes different challenges with respect to relatively slow or fast chemistry and smooth or sharp gradients, respectively. In every test, error measures have been calculated and used for ranking of the advection schemes with respect to performance, i.e. lowest overall errors for all chemical species. Furthermore, the HEL and SL schemes have been compared in a shallow water model, demonstrating the performance in a more realistic non-linear deformation flow.

The results in this paper show that the new advection scheme, HEL, by far outperforms both the Eulerian and semi-Lagrangian schemes with very low error estimates compared to the two other schemes. Although no analytic solution can be obtained for the performance in the non-linear shallow water model flow, the tracer distribution appears realistic as compared to LMCSL when a mixing between local parcel concentrations is introduced in HEL.