A High-Order Well-Balanced Discontinuous Galerkin Method for Hyperbolic Balance Laws Based on the Gauss-Lobatto Quadrature Rules

Abstract In this paper, we develop a high-order well-balanced discontinuous Galerkin method for hyperbolic balance laws based on the Gauss-Lobatto quadrature rules. Important applications of the method include preserving the non-hydrostatic equilibria of shallow water equations with non-flat bottom topography and Euler equations in gravitational fields. The well-balanced property is achieved through two essential components. First, the source term is reformulated in a flux-gradient form in the local reference equilibrium state to mimic the true flux gradient in the balance laws. Consequently, the source term integral is discretized using the same approach as the flux integral at Gauss-Lobatto quadrature points, ensuring that the source term is exactly balanced by the flux in equilibrium states. Our method differs from existing well-balanced DG methods for shallow water equations with non-hydrostatic equilibria, particularly in the aspect that it does not require the decomposition of the source term integral. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated through ample numerical tests.