An Eulerian–Lagrangian Weighted Essentially Nonoscillatory scheme for nonlinear conservation laws

We develop a formally high order Eulerian–Lagrangian Weighted Essentially Nonoscillatory (EL‐WENO) finite volume scheme for nonlinear scalar conservation laws that combines ideas of Lagrangian traceline methods with WENO reconstructions. The particles within a grid element are transported in the manner of a standard Eulerian–Lagrangian (or semi‐Lagrangian) scheme using a fixed velocity v . A flux correction computation accounts for particles that cross the v ‐traceline during the time step. If v  = 0, the scheme reduces to an almost standard WENO5 scheme. The CFL condition is relaxed when v is chosen to approximate either the characteristic or particle velocity. Excellent numerical results are obtained using relatively long time steps. The v ‐traceback points can fall arbitrarily within the computational grid, and linear WENO weights may not exist for the point. A general WENO technique is described to reconstruct to any order the integral of a smooth function using averages defined over a general, nonuniform computational grid. Moreover, to high accuracy, local averages can also be reconstructed. By re‐averaging the function to a uniform reconstruction grid that includes a point of interest, one can apply a standard WENO reconstruction to obtain a high order point value of the function. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 33: 651–680, 2017