General Description

The Courant number, C_R is defined as follows:

(6.7)   

where Dt is the time step, Ds is the grid spacing in one of the horizontal direc­tions and c is the celerity of the barotropic wave given by

(6.8)   

As the barotropic information (about surface elevations and velocities) in the computational grid travels at a speed corresponding to the celerity, the Cou­rant number actually expresses how many grid points the information moves in one time step.