Diffusive Wave Approximation to the Shallow Water Equations: Computational Approach

We discuss the use of time adaptivity applied to the one dimensional diffusive wave approximation to the shallow water equations. A simple and computationally economical error estimator is discussed which enables time-step size adaptivity. This robust adaptive time discretization corrects the initial time step size to achieve a user specified bound on the discretization error and allows time step size variations of several orders of magnitude. In particular, in the one dimensional results presented in this work feature a change of four orders of magnitudes for the time step over the entire simulation.