Many geophysical fluid dynamics problems include large variations in spatial scales that are important to resolve in a numerical simulation. An important example being the global ocean where dynamics at spatial scales of thousands of kms has strong two-way coupling with processes occurring at the km, and sub-km, scale, e.g. boundary layers, eddies and buoyancy driven flows interacting with bathymetry. Adaptive and unstructured mesh methods represent a possible means to simulate these multi-scale systems efficiently. In addition, smaller scale processes often have high aspect ratios and hence anisotropic mesh methods should be considered. In this talk our work applying anisotropic adaptive methods to geophysical fluid dynamics problems will be reviewed. In particular, error measures, mesh to mesh interpolation, load-balanced parallelism, and combined mesh optimisation and mesh movement methods will be discussed. A series of recent applications will also be presented.
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