Third- and fourth-order well-balanced schemes for the shallow water equations based on the CWENO reconstruction

High-order finite volume schemes for conservation laws are very useful in applications, due to their ability to compute accurate solutions on quite coarse meshes and with very few restrictions on the kind of cells employed in the discretization. For balance laws, the ability to approximate up to machine precision relevant steady states allows the scheme to compute accurately, also on coarse meshes, small perturbations of such states, which are very relevant for many applications. In this paper, we propose third- and fourth-order accurate finite volume schemes for the shallow water equations. The schemes have the well-balanced property thanks to a path-conservative approach applied to an appropriate nonconservative reformulation of the equations. High-order accuracy is achieved by designing truly two-dimensional (2D) reconstruction procedures of the central WENO (CWENO) type. The novel schemes are tested for accuracy and well-balancing and shown to maintain positivity of the water height on wet/dry transitions. Finally, they are applied to simulate the Tohoku 2011 tsunami event.