Moving-water equilibria preserving central-upwind schemes for the shallow water equations

Abstract

We construct a new second-order moving-water equilibria preserving central-upwind scheme for the one-dimensional 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.