Well-balanced mesh-based and meshless schemes for the shallow-water equations

Abstract

We formulate a general criterion for the exact preservation of the "lake at rest" solution in general mesh-based and meshless numerical schemes for the strong form of the shallow-water equations with bottom topography. The main idea is a careful mimetic design for the spatial derivative operators in the momentum flux equation that is paired with a compatible averaging rule for the water column height arising in the bottom topography source term. We prove consistency of the mimetic difference operators analytically and demonstrate the well-balanced property numerically using finite difference and RBF-FD schemes in the one- and two-dimensional cases.