  This paper introduces tensorial calculus techniques in the framework of
Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) to reduce the computational complexity of
the reduced nonlinear terms. The resulting method, named tensorial POD, can be
applied to polynomial nonlinearities of any degree $p$. Such nonlinear terms
have an on-line complexity of $\mathcal{O}(k^{p+1})$, where $k$ is the
dimension of POD basis, and therefore is independent of full space dimension.
However it is efficient only for quadratic nonlinear terms since for higher
nonlinearities standard POD proves to be less time consuming once the POD basis
dimension $k$ is increased. Numerical experiments are carried out with a two
dimensional shallow water equation (SWE) test problem to compare the
performance of tensorial POD, standard POD, and POD/Discrete Empirical
Interpolation Method (DEIM). Numerical results show that tensorial POD
decreases by $76\times$ times the computational cost of the on-line stage of
standard POD for configurations using more than $300,000$ model variables. The
tensorial POD SWE model was only $2-8\times$ slower than the POD/DEIM SWE model
but the implementation effort is considerably increased. Tensorial calculus was
again employed to construct a new algorithm allowing POD/DEIM shallow water
equation model to compute its off-line stage faster than the standard and
tensorial POD approaches.
