A well-balanced finite difference WENO scheme for shallow water flow model

In this paper, we are concerned with shallow water flow model over non-flat bottom topography by high-order schemes. Most of the numerical schemes in the literature are developed from the original mathematical model of the shallow water flow. The novel contribution of this study consists in designing a finite difference weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) scheme based on the alternative formulation of the shallow water flow model, denoted as “pre-balanced’’ shallow water equations and introduced in Rogers et al. (2003) [23]. This formulation greatly simplifies the achievement of the well-balancing of the present scheme. Rigorous numerical analysis as well as extensive numerical results all verify that the current scheme preserves the exact conservation property. It is important to note that this resulting scheme also maintains the non-oscillatory property near discontinuities and keeps high-order accuracy for smooth solutions at the same time.