A mass conservative TR-BDF2 semi-implicit semi-Lagrangian DG discretization of the shallow water equations on general structured meshes of quadrilaterals

Abstract As an extension of a previous work considering a fully advective formulation on Cartesian meshes, a mass conservative discretization approach is presented here for the shallow water equations, based on discontinuous finite elements on general structured meshes of quadrilaterals. A semi-implicit time integration is performed by employing the TR-BDF2 scheme and is combined with the semi-Lagrangian technique for the momentum equation only. Indeed, in order to simplify the derivation of the discrete linear Helmoltz equation to be solved at each time-step, a non-conservative formulation of the momentum equation is employed. The Eulerian flux form is considered instead for the continuity equation in order to ensure mass conservation. Numerical results show that on distorted meshes and for relatively high polynomial degrees, the proposed numerical method fully conserves mass and presents a higher level of accuracy than a standard off-centered Crank Nicolson approach. This is achieved without any significant imprinting of the mesh distortion on the solution.