High‐resolution,monotone solution of the adjoint shallow‐water equations

A monotone, second‐order accurate numerical scheme is presented for solving the differential form of the adjoint shallow‐water equations in generalized two‐dimensional coordinates. Fluctuation‐splitting is utilized to achieve a high‐resolution solution of the equations in primitive form. One‐step and two‐step schemes are presented and shown to achieve solutions of similarly high accuracy in one dimension. However, the two‐step method is shown to yield more accurate solutions to problems in which unsteady wave speeds are present. In two dimensions, the two‐step scheme is tested in the context of two parameter identification problems, and it is shown to accurately transmit the information needed to identify unknown forcing parameters based on measurements of the system response. The first problem involves the identification of an upstream flood hydrograph based on downstream depth measurements. The second problem involves the identification of a long wave state in the far‐field based on near‐field depth measurements. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.