<i>A-posteriori</i> error estimates for systems of hyperbolic conservation laws via computing negative norms of local residuals

Abstract We prove rigorous a-posteriori error estimates for first-order finite-volume approximations of nonlinear systems of hyperbolic conservation laws in one spatial dimension. Our estimators rely on recent stability results by Bressan, Chiri and Shen, a new way to localize residuals and a novel method to compute negative-order norms of these local residuals. Computing negative-order norms becomes possible by suitably projecting test functions onto a finite dimensional space. Numerical experiments show that the error estimator converges with the rate predicted by a-priori error estimates.