We analyze the discretization errors of discontinuous Galerkin solutions of steady two-dimensional hyperbolic conservation laws on unstructured meshes. We show that the leading term of the error on each element is a linear combination of orthogonal polynomials of degrees
p and
p+1. We further show that there is a strong superconvergence property at the outflow edge(s) of each element where the average discretization error converges as O(
h
2p+1) compared to a global rate of O(
h
p+1). Our analyses apply to both linear and nonlinear conservation laws with smooth solutions. We show how to use our theory to construct efficient and asymptotically exact
a posteriori discretization error estimates and we apply these to some examples.
discontinuous Galerkin methods - hyperbolic systems - error estimation