SUMMARYThis paper presents a simple and efficient procedure developed for tracing discontinuities in flow fields. Numerical experiments are carried out to test the new sensor coupled with the associated nonlinear WENO dissipation filter developed to suppress the numerical dissipation. The tests show that, for a problem containing shocks and vortices, the implementation of the new sensor and an optimized WENO scheme can obtain a stable and highly resolved solution. The numerical experiments demonstrated that the new filter scheme performs efficiently both in parallel and serial running for one‐dimensional inviscid flow problems. Direct numerical simulation of a Mach 5 turbulent boundary layer over a flat plate was carried out to demonstrate the applicability of the scheme to the DNS practices. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.