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Abstract High order schemes are known to be unstable in the presence of shock discontinuities or under‐resolved solution features, and have traditionally required additional filtering, limiting, or artificial viscosity to avoid solution blow up. Entropy stable schemes address this instability by ensuring that physically relevant solutions satisfy a semi‐discrete entropy inequality independently of discretization parameters. However, additional measures must be taken to ensure that solutions satisfy physical constraints such as positivity. In this work, we present a high order entropy stable discontinuous Galerkin (ESDG) method for the nonlinear shallow water equations (SWE) on two‐dimensional (2D) triangular meshes which preserves the positivity of the water heights. The scheme combines a low order positivity preserving method with a high order entropy stable method using convex limiting. This method is entropy stable and well‐balanced for fitted meshes with continuous bathymetry profiles. 

High order entropy stable schemes provide improved robustness for computational simulations of fluid flows. However, additional stabilization and positivity preserving limiting can still be required for variable-density flows with under-resolved features. We demonstrate numerically that entropy stable Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods which incorporate an “entropy projection” are less likely to require additional limiting to retain positivity for certain types of flows. We conclude by investigating potential explanations for this observed improvement in robustness.