Numerical analysis to discontinuous Galerkin methods for the age structured population model of marine invertebrates

In this article we consider the age structured population growth model of marine invertebrates. The problem is a nonlinear coupled system of the age‐density distribution of sessile adults and the abundance of larvae. We propose the semidiscrete and fully‐discrete discontinuous Galerkin schemes to the nonlinear problem. The DG method is well suited to approximate the local behavior of the problem and to easily take the locally refined meshes with hanging nodes adaptively. The simple communication pattern between elements makes the DG method ideal for parallel computation. The global existence of the approximation solution is proved for the nonlinear approximation system by using the broken Sobolev spaces and the Schauder's fixed point theorem, and error estimates are obtained for both the semidiscrete scheme and the fully‐discrete scheme. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq, 2009