A new well-posed vorticity divergence formulation of the shallow water equations

Abstract

A new vorticity–divergence formulation of the two-dimensional shallow water equations including boundary conditions is derived. The new formulation is necessary since the conventional one does not lead to a well-posed initial boundary value problem for limited-area modelling.The new vorticity–divergence formulation includes four dependent variables instead of three and requires more equations and boundary conditions than the conventional formulation. On the other hand, it forms a hyperbolic set of equations with well-defined boundary conditions that leads to a well-posed problem with bounded energy.