A high-order Newton multigrid method with a simplified Jacobian for steady-state shallow water equations

A high-order Newton multigrid method is proposed for steady-state shallow water flows in open channels with regular and irregular geometries. The method integrates a finite volume discretization with third-order weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) reconstruction and a Newton multigrid framework with an efficient approximation of the Jacobian matrix for solving the resulting discrete system. In high-order schemes, the computational cost of Jacobian construction becomes dominant due to the wide stencil. Meanwhile, only a small fraction of the non-zero Jacobian entries exhibit large magnitudes. Based on this observation, a simplified Jacobian approximation is introduced using reduced stencils, in which selected off-stencil contributions are neglected, thereby achieving a substantial reduction in computational cost. The proposed approach is verified numerically to show significant efficiency improvement while maintaining comparable convergence behavior to that obtained with the full Jacobian approach. To further enhance performance, a geometric multigrid method incorporating a successive over-relaxation iteration as the smoother is applied to solve the linear systems arising in each Newton step. A variety of numerical experiments, including a one-dimensional smooth subcritical flow, flows over a hump, and a two-dimensional hydraulic jump over a wedge, are carried out to illustrate the third-order accuracy, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed method.