Paper detail

A continuous/discontinuous Galerkin solution of the shallow water equations with dynamic viscosity, high-order wetting and drying, and implicit time integration

The high-order numerical solution of the non-linear shallow water equations (and of hyperbolic systems in general) is susceptible to unphysical Gibbs oscillations that form in the proximity of strong gradients. The solution to this problem is still an active field of research as no general cure has been found yet. In this paper, we tackle this issue by presenting a dynamically adaptive viscosity based on a residual-based sub-grid scale model that has the following properties: $(i)$ it removes the spurious oscillations in the proximity of strong wave fronts while preserving the overall accuracy and sharpness of the solution. This is possible because of the residual-based definition of the dynamic diffusion coefficient. $(ii)$ For coarse grids, it prevents energy from building up at small wave-numbers. $(iii)$ The model has no tunable parameter. Our interest in the shallow water equations is tied to the simulation of coastal inundation, where a careful handling of the transition between dry and wet surfaces is particularly challenging for high-order Galerkin approximations. In this paper, we extend to a unified continuous/discontinuous Galerkin (CG/DG) framework a very simple, yet effective wetting and drying algorithm originally designed for DG [Xing, Zhang, Shu (2010)]. We show its effectiveness for problems in one and two dimensions on domains of increasing characteristic lengths varying from centimeters to kilometers. Finally, to overcome the time-step restriction incurred by the high-order Galerkin approximation, we advance the equations forward in time via a three stage, second order explicit-first-stage, singly diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta (ESDIRK) time integration scheme. Via ESDIRK, we are able to preserve numerical stability for an advective CFL number 10 times larger than its explicit counterpart.