  This paper studies the spatial manifestations of order reduction that occur
when time-stepping initial-boundary-value problems (IBVPs) with high-order
Runge-Kutta methods. For such IBVPs, geometric structures arise that do not
have an analog in ODE IVPs: boundary layers appear, induced by a mismatch
between the approximation error in the interior and at the boundaries. To
understand those boundary layers, an analysis of the modes of the numerical
scheme is conducted, which explains under which circumstances boundary layers
persist over many time steps. Based on this, two remedies to order reduction
are studied: first, a new condition on the Butcher tableau, called weak stage
order, that is compatible with diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta schemes; and
second, the impact of modified boundary conditions on the boundary layer theory
is analyzed.
