On the Spatial and Temporal Order of Convergence of Hyperbolic PDEs

In this work, we determine the full expression of the local truncation error of hyperbolic partial differential equations (PDEs) on a uniform mesh. If we are employing a stable numerical scheme and the global solution error is of the same order of accuracy as the global truncation error, we make the following observations in the asymptotic regime, where the truncation error is dominated by the powers of $\Delta x$ and $\Delta t$ rather than their coefficients. Assuming that we reach the asymptotic regime before the machine precision error takes over, (a) the order of convergence of stable numerical solutions of hyperbolic PDEs at constant ratio of $\Delta t$ to $\Delta x$ is governed by the minimum of the orders of the spatial and temporal discretizations, and (b) convergence cannot even be guaranteed under only spatial or temporal refinement. We have tested our theory against numerical methods employing Method of Lines and not against ones that treat space and time together, and we have not taken into consideration the reduction in the spatial and temporal orders of accuracy resulting from slope-limiting monotonicity-preserving strategies commonly applied to finite volume methods. Otherwise, our theory applies to any hyperbolic PDE, be it linear or non-linear, and employing finite difference, finite volume, or finite element discretization in space, and advanced in time with a predictor-corrector, multistep, or a deferred correction method. If the PDE is reduced to an ordinary differential equation (ODE) by specifying the spatial gradients of the dependent variable and the coefficients and the source terms to be zero, then the standard local truncation error of the ODE is recovered. We perform the analysis with generic and specific hyperbolic PDEs using the symbolic algebra package SymPy, and conduct a number of numerical experiments to demonstrate our theoretical findings.