  A singularly perturbed convection-diffusion problem,posed on the unit square
in $\mathbb{R}^2$, is studied; its solution has both exponential and
characteristic boundary layers. The problem is solved numerically using the
local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method on Shishkin meshes. Using
tensor-product piecewise polynomials of degree at most $k>0$ in each variable,
the error between the LDG solution and the true solution is proved to converge,
uniformly in the singular perturbation parameter, at a rate of $O((N^{-1}\ln
N)^{k+1/2})$ in an associated energy norm, where $N$ is the number of mesh
intervals in each coordinate direction.(This is the first uniform convergence
result proved for the LDG method applied to a problem with characteristic
boundary layers.) Furthermore, we prove that this order of convergence
increases to $O((N^{-1}\ln N)^{k+1})$ when one measures the energy-norm
difference between the LDG solution and a local Gauss-Radau projection of the
true solution into the finite element space.This uniform supercloseness
property implies an optimal $L^2$ error estimate of order $(N^{-1}\ln N)^{k+1}$
for our LDG method. Numerical experiments show the sharpness of our theoretical
results.
