Positivity-Preserving Well-Balanced Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for the Shallow Water Equations on Unstructured Triangular Meshes

Abstract The shallow water equations model flows in rivers and coastal areas and have wide applications in ocean, hydraulic engineering, and atmospheric modeling. In “Xing et al. Adv. Water Resourc. 33: 1476–1493, 2010)”, the authors constructed high order discontinuous Galerkin methods for the shallow water equations which can maintain the still water steady state exactly, and at the same time can preserve the non-negativity of the water height without loss of mass conservation. In this paper, we explore the extension of these methods on unstructured triangular meshes. The simple positivity-preserving limiter is reformulated, and we prove that the resulting scheme guarantees the positivity of the water depth. Extensive numerical examples are provided to verify the positivity-preserving property, well-balanced property, high-order accuracy, and good resolution for smooth and discontinuous solutions