Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2017
In this paper, a new combined method is presented to simulate saltwater intrusion problem. A splitting positive definite mixed element method is used to solve the water head equation, and a symmetric discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element method is used to solve the concentration equation. The introduction of these two numerical methods not only makes the coefficient matrixes symmetric positive definite, but also does well with the discontinuous problem. The convergence of this method is considered and the optimal L2-norm error estimate is also derived.