A Positivity-Preserving Well-Balanced Central Discontinuous Galerkin Method for the Nonlinear Shallow Water Equations

In this paper, we consider the development of central discontinuous Galerkin methods for solving the nonlinear shallow water equations over variable bottom topography in one and two dimensions. A reliable numerical scheme for these equations should preserve still-water stationary solutions and maintain the non-negativity of the water depth. We propose a high-order technique which exactly balances the flux gradients and source terms in the still-water stationary case by adding correction terms to the base scheme, meanwhile ensures the non-negativity of the water depth by using special approximations to the bottom together with a positivity-preserving limiter. Numerical tests are presented to illustrate the accuracy and validity of the proposed schemes.