Penalty-scaling effects in nonsymmetric interior-penalty DG discretizations of viscous rotating shallow-water equations

Abstract

We investigate how the scaling of the interior-penalty parameter affects nonsymmetric interior-penalty Galerkin (NIPG) discretizations of the viscous rotating shallow-water equations in geopotential variables. The hyperbolic terms are approximated by a local Lax--Friedrichs flux, while viscosity acts on the momentum variables through a penalty law $\mu_e=\sigma h_e^{-\beta}$. The standard choice $\beta=1$ and the super-penalized choice $\beta=3$ are compared with a symmetric interior-penalty Galerkin reference. For the diffusion form, we establish consistency, continuity for $\beta\ge 1$, and an exact coercivity identity in the momentum DG seminorm. Manufactured-solution tests show that super-penalization can recover the expected momentum $L^2$ accuracy, whereas the coupled geopotential variable need not exhibit the same improvement. Rotating and topography-aware tests further show that the standard scaling generally gives the better accuracy-cost compromise for the explicit implementation considered here.