A semi-Lagrangian approach to the shallow water equation

We present a formulation of the shallow water equations that emphasizes the conservation of potential vorticity. A locally conservative semi-Lagrangian time-stepping scheme is developed, which leads to a system of three coupled PDE's to be solved at each time level. We describe a smoothing analysis of these equations, on which an effective multigrid solver is constructed. Some results from applying this solver to the static version of these equations are presented.