Balanced Central Schemes for the Shallow Water Equations on Unstructured Grids

We present a two-dimensional, well-balanced, central-upwind scheme for approximating solutions of the shallow water equations in the presence of a stationary bottom topography on triangular meshes. Our starting point is the recent central scheme of Kurganov and Petrova (KP) for approximating solutions of conservation laws on triangular meshes. In order to extend this scheme from systems of conservation laws to systems of balance laws one has to find an appropriate discretization of the source terms. We first show that for general triangulations there is no discretization of the source terms that corresponds to a well-balanced form of the KP scheme. We then derive a new variant of a central scheme that can be balanced on triangular meshes. We note in passing that it is straightforward to extend the KP scheme to general unstructured conformal meshes. This extension allows us to recover our previous well-balanced scheme on Cartesian grids. We conclude with several simulations, verifying the second-order accuracy of our scheme as well as its well-balanced properties.