On Classical Solutions to 2D Shallow Water Equations with Degenerate Viscosities

2D shallow water equations have degenerate viscosities proportional to surface height, which vanishes in many physical considerations, say, when the initial total mass, or energy are finite. Such a degeneracy is a highly challenging obstacle for development of well-posedness theory, even local-in-time theory remains open for a long time. In this paper, we will address this open problem with some new perspectives, independent of the celebrated BD-entropy (Bresch et al in Commun Math Phys 238:211-223, 2003, Commun Part Differ Eqs 28:843-868, 2003, Analysis and Simulation of Fluid Dynamics, 2007). After exploring some interesting structures of most models of 2D shallow water equations, we introduced a proper notion of solution class, called regular solutions, and identified a class of initial data with finite total mass and energy, and established the local-in-time well-posedness of this class of smooth solutions. The theory is applicable to most relatively physical shallow water models, broader than those with BD-entropy structures. We remark that our theory is on the local strong solutions, while the BD entropy is an essential tool for the global weak solutions. Later, a Beale-Kato-Majda type blow-up criterion is also established. This paper is mainly based on our early preprint (Li et al. in 2D compressible Navier-Stokes equations with degenerate viscosities and far field vacuum, preprint. arXiv:1407.8471, 2014).