Comparison of continuous and discontinuous Galerkin approaches for variable-viscosity Stokes flow

We describe a Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) scheme for variable-viscosity Stokes flow which is a crucial aspect of many geophysical modelling applications and conduct numerical experiments with different elements comparing the DG approach to the standard Finite Element Method (FEM). We compare the divergence-conforming lowest-order Raviart-Thomas (RT0P0) and Brezzi-Douglas-Marini (BDM1P0) element in the DG scheme with the bilinear Q1P0 and biquadratic Q2P1 elements for velocity and their matching piecewise constant/linear elements for pressure in the standard continuous Galerkin (CG) scheme with respect to accuracy and memory usage in 2D benchmark setups. We find that for the chosen geodynami…