AbstractThis work investigates high‐order central compact methods for simulating turbulent supersonic flows that include shock waves. Several different types of previously proposed characteristic filters, including total variation diminishing, monotone upstream‐centered scheme for conservation laws, and weighted essentially non‐oscillatory filters, are investigated in this study. Similar to the traditional shock capturing schemes, these filters can eliminate the numerical instability caused by large gradients in flow fields, but they also improve efficiency compared with classical shock‐capturing schemes. Adding the nonlinear dissipation part of a classical shock‐capturing scheme to a central scheme makes the method suitable for incorporation into any existing central‐based high‐order subsonic code. The amount of numerical dissipation to add is sensed by means of the artificial compression method switch. In order to improve the performance of the characteristic filters, we propose a hybrid approach to minimize the dissipation added by the characteristic filter. Through several numerical experiments (including a shock/density wave interaction, a shock/vortex interaction, and a shock/mixing layer interaction) we show that our hybrid approach works better than the original method, and can be used for future turbulent flow simulations that include shocks. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.