COMPARISON OFH ANDP FINITE ELEMENT APPROXIMATIONS OF THE SHALLOW WATER EQUATIONS

Abstract

SUMMARY A p-type finite element scheme is introduced for the three-dimensional shallow water equations with a harmonic expansion in time. The wave continuity equation formulation is used which decouples the problem into a Helmholtz equation for surface elevation and a momentum equation for horizontal velocity. An exploration of the applicability of p methods to this form of the shallow water problem is presented, with a consideration of the problem of continuity errors. The convergence rates and relative computational efficiency between h- and p-type methods are compared with the use of three test cases representing various degrees of difficulty. A channel test case establishes convergence rates, a continental shelf test case examines a problem with accuracy difficulties at the shelf break, and a field-scale test case examines problems with highly irregular grids. For the irregular grids, adaptive h combined with uniform p refinement was necessary to retain high convergence rates.