Numerical methods for nonlinear hillslope transport laws

[1] The numerical methods used to solve nonlinear sediment transport equations often set very restrictive limits on the stability and accuracy of landscape evolution models. This is especially true for hillslope transport laws in which sediment flux increases nonlinearly as the surface slope approaches a limiting value. Explicit‐time finite difference methods applied to such laws are subject to fundamental limits on numerical stability that require time steps much shorter than the timescales over which landscapes evolve, creating a heavy computational burden. I present an implicit method for nonlinear hillslope transport that builds on a previously proposed approach to modeling alluvial sediment transport and improves stability and accuracy by avoiding the direct calculation of sediment flux. This method can be adapted to any transport law in which the expression for sediment flux is differentiable. Comparisons of numerical solutions with analytic solutions in one and two dimensions show that the implicit method retains the accuracy of a standard explicit method while permitting time steps several orders of magnitude longer than the maximum stable time step for the explicit method. The ability to take long time steps affords a substantial savings in overall computation time, despite the implicit method’s higher per‐iteration computational cost. Implicit models for hillslope evolution also offer a distinct advantage when modeling the response of hillslopes to incising channels.