APPROXIMATION OF SHALLOW-WATER EQUATIONS BY ROE RIEMANN SOLVER

The inviscid shallow water equations provide a genuinely hyperbolic system and ail the numerical tools that have been developed for a system of conservation laws can be applied to them. However, this system of equations presents some peculiarities that can be exploited when developing a numerical method based on Roe's Riemann solver and enhanced by a slope limiting of MUSCL type. In the present paper a TVD version of the Lax-Wendroff scheme is used and its performance is shown in 1D and 2D computations. Then two specific difficulties that arise in this context are investigated. The former is the capability of this class of schemes to handle geometric source terms that arise to model the bottom variation. The latter analysis pertains to situations in which strict hyperbolicity is lost, i.e. when two eigenvalues collapse into one.