An adaptive well-balanced positivity preserving central-upwind scheme on quadtree grids for shallow water equations

Abstract: We present an adaptive well-balanced positivity preserving central-upwind scheme on quadtree grids for shallow water equations. The use of quadtree grids results in a robust, efficient and highly accurate numerical method. The quadtree model is developed based on the well-balanced positivity preserving central-upwind scheme proposed in [A. Kurganov and G. Petrova, Commun. Math. Sci., 5 (2007), pp. 133--160]. The designed scheme is well-balanced in the sense that it is capable of exactly preserving "lake-at-rest" steady states. In order to achieve this as well as to preserve positivity of water depth, a continuous piecewise bilinear interpolation of the bottom topography function is utilized. This makes the proposed scheme capable of modelling flows over discontinuous bottom topography. Local gradients are examined to determine new seeding points in grid refinement for the next timestep. Numerical examples demonstrate the promising performance of the central-upwind quadtree scheme.