An adaptive space-time shock capturing method with high order wavelet bases for the system of shallow water equations.

Purpose This paper aims to propose an adaptive method for the numerical solution of the shallow water equations (SWEs). The authors provide an arbitrary high-order method using high-order spline wavelets. Furthermore, they use a non-linear shock capturing (SC) diffusion which removes the necessity of post-processing.Design/methodology/approach The authors use a space-time weak formulation of SWEs which exploits continuous Galerkin (cG) in space and discontinuous Galerkin (dG) in time allowing time stepping, also known as cGdG. Such formulations along with SC term have recently been proved to ensure the stability of fully discrete schemes without scarifying the accuracy. However, the resulting scheme is expensive in terms of number of degrees of freedom (DoFs). By using natural adaptivity of wavelet expansions, the authors devise an adaptive algorithm to reduce the number of DoFs.Findings The proposed algorithm uses DoFs in a dynamic way to capture the shocks in all time steps while keeping the representation of approximate solution sparse. The performance of the proposed scheme is shown through some numerical examples.Originality/value An incorporation of wavelets for adaptivity in space-time weak formulations applied for SWEs is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]