Title: Central Schemes for Shallow Water Flows along Channels with
Irregular Geometry

Abstract:

We present a new high-resolution, non-oscillatory central scheme for
one-dimensional shallow water flows along channels with non-uniform 
rectangular cross sections and bottom topography.  The scheme is
based on a central semi-discrete formulation for hyperbolic
conservation laws, and it enjoys two properties crucial for the
accurate simulation of shallow water flows: it preserves the 
positivity of the water height, and it is well balanced, i.e., the
source terms arising from the geometry of the channel are discretized
so as to balance the non-linear hyperbolic fluxes.  Along with a
detailed description of the scheme and its properties, we present 
several numerical experiments --including the approximation of exact
equilibrium solutions-- that demonstrate the robustness --and
simplicity-- of the numerical algorithm.