Error estimates of invariant-preserving difference schemes for the rotation-two-component Camassa–Holm system with small energy

A rotation-two-component Camassa–Holm (R2CH) system was proposed recently to describe the motion of shallow water waves under the influence of gravity. This is a highly nonlinear and strongly coupled system of partial differential equations. A crucial issue in designing numerical schemes is to preserve invariants as many as possible at the discrete level. In this paper, we present a provable implicit nonlinear difference scheme which preserves at least three discrete conservation invariants: energy, mass, and momentum, and prove the existence of the difference solution via the Browder theorem. The error analysis is based on novel and refined estimates of the bilinear operator in the difference scheme. By skillfully using the energy method, we prove that the difference scheme not only converges unconditionally when the rotational parameter diminishes, but also converges without any step-ratio restriction for the small energy case when the rotational parameter is nonzero. The convergence orders in both settings (zero or nonzero rotation parameter) are \(O(\tau ^2 + h^2)\) for the velocity in the \(L^\infty \)-norm and the surface elevation in the \(L^2\)-norm, where \(\tau \) denotes the temporal stepsize and h the spatial stepsize, respectively. The theoretical predictions are confirmed by a properly designed two-level iteration scheme. Compared with existing numerical methods in the literature, the proposed method demonstrates its effectiveness for long-time simulation over larger domains and superior resolution for both smooth and non-smooth initial values.