On error estimates for Galerkin finite element methods for the Camassa-Holm equation.

We consider the Camassa–Holm (CH) equation, a nonlinear dispersive wave equation that models one-way propagation of long waves of moderately small amplitude. We discretize in space the periodic initial-value problem for CH (written in its original and in system form), using the standard Galerkin finite element method with smooth splines on a uniform mesh, and prove optimal-order $$L^{2}$$L2-error estimates for the semidiscrete approximation. Using the fourth-order accurate, explicit, “classical” Runge–Kutta scheme for time-stepping, we construct a highly accurate, stable, fully discrete scheme that we employ in numerical experiments to approximate solutions of CH, mainly smooth travelling waves and nonsmooth solitons of the ‘peakon’ type.