First-order continuation method for steady-state variably saturated groundwater flow modeling

Abstract: Recently, the nonlinearity continuation method has been used to numerically solve boundary value problems for steady-state Richards equation. The method can be considered as a predictor-corrector procedure with the simplest form which has been applied to date having a trivial, zeroth-order predictor. In this article, effect of a more sophisticated predictor technique is examined. Numerical experiments are performed with finite volume and mimetic finite difference discretizations on various problems, including real-life examples.