A high-order velocity-based discontinuous Galerkin scheme for the shallow water equations: local conservation, entropy stability, well-balanced property, and positivity preservation

We present a novel class of locally conservative, entropy stable and well-balanced discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for the nonlinear shallow water equation with a non-flat bottom topography. The major novelty of our work is the use of velocity field as an independent solution unknown in the DG scheme, which is closely related to the entropy variable approach to entropy stable schemes for system of conservation laws proposed by Tadmor [22] back in 1986, where recall that velocity is part of the entropy variable for the shallow water equations. Due to the use of velocity as an independent solution unknown, no specific numerical quadrature rules are needed to achieve entropy stability of our scheme on general unstructured meshes in two dimensions. The proposed DG semi-discretization is then carefully combined with the classical explicit strong stability preserving Runge-Kutta (SSP-RK) time integrators [13] to yield a locally conservative, well-balanced, and positivity preserving fully discrete scheme. Here the positivity preservation property is enforced with the help of a simple scaling limiter. In the fully discrete scheme, we re-introduce discharge as an auxiliary unknown variable. In doing so, standard slope limiting procedures can be applied on the conservative variables (water height and discharge) without violating the local conservation property. Here we apply a characteristic-wise TVB limiter [5] on the conservative variables using the Fu-Shu troubled cell indicator [10] in each inner stage of the Runge-Kutta time stepping to suppress numerical oscillations.