Central-upwind schemes for shallow water models
Description
Shallow water models are widely used to describe and study fluid dynamics phenomena where the horizontal length scale is much greater than the vertical length scale, for example, in the atmosphere and oceans. Since analytical solutions of the shallow water models are typically out of reach, development of accurate and efficient numerical methods is crucial to understand many mechanisms of atmospheric and oceanic phenomena. In this dissertation, we are interested in developing simple, accurate, efficient and robust numerical methods for two shallow water models --- the Saint-Venant system of shallow water equations and the two-mode shallow water equations. We first construct a new second-order moving-water equilibria preserving central-upwind scheme for the Saint-Venant system of shallow water equations. Special reconstruction procedure and source term discretization are the key components that guarantee the resulting scheme is capable of exactly preserving smooth moving-water steady-state solutions and a draining time-step technique ensures positivity of the water depth. Several numerical experiments are performed to verify the well-balanced and positivity preserving properties as well as the ability of the proposed scheme to accurately capture small perturbations of moving-water steady states. We also demonstrate the advantage and importance of utilizing the new method over its still-water equilibria preserving counterpart. We then develop and study numerical methods for the two-mode shallow water equations in a systematic way. Designing a reliable numerical method for this system is a challenging task due to its conditional hyperbolicity and the presence of nonconservative terms. We present several numerical approaches---two operator splitting methods (based on either Roe-type upwind or central-upwind scheme), a central-upwind scheme and a path-conservative central-upwind scheme---and test their performance in a number of numerical experiments. The obtained results demonstrate that a careful numerical treatment of nonconservative terms is crucial for designing a robust and highly accurate numerical method for this system.