 Saint-Venant dry-front condition

The shallow water equations at a dry bed, with negligible ambient mass density, end in a vanishing-depth edge, rather than a finite-depth gravity current head. In a prismatic triangular channel the Riemann invariant $u+4\sqrt{g^{\prime }h/2}$ gives the speed $2\sqrt{2g^{\prime }{h}_0}$ after release of a resting semi-infinite layer of depth $h_0$. In a rectangular channel the corresponding speed is $2\sqrt{g^{\prime }{h}_0}$; the channel geometry matters.