Abstract. We present the first fourth-order central scheme for two-dimensional hyperbolic systems of conservation laws. Our new method is based on a central weighted nonoscillatory approach. The heart of our method is the reconstruction step, in which a genuinely two-dimensional interpolant is reconstructed from cell averages by taking a convex combination of building blocks in the form of biquadratic polynomials.Similarly to other central schemes, our new method enjoys the simplicity of the black-box approach. All that is required in order to solve a problem is to supply the flux function and an estimate on the speed of propagation. The high-resolution properties of the scheme as well as its resistance to mesh orientation, and the effectiveness of the componentwise approach, are demonstrated in a variety of numerical examples.Key words. hyperbolic systems, central difference schemes, high-order accuracy, nonoscillatory schemes, weighted essentially nonoscillatory reconstruction, central weighted essentially nonoscillatory reconstruction AMS subject classification. 65M06 PII. S10648275013858521. Introduction. The integration of hyperbolic systems of conservation laws has initially been approached in the framework of upwind schemes, generalizing the firstorder upwind Godunov scheme. Effective high-order methods based on the upwind approach are the essentially nonoscillatory (ENO) schemes [7,32] and more recently the weighted ENO (WENO) schemes [26,8]. For a thorough review of the schemes obtained with the upwind approach, see [31] and [6].More recently high-order central schemes have appeared. These schemes can be viewed as extensions of the first-order Lax-Friedrichs scheme [5]. They are characterized by a very simple formulation, which, unlike traditional upwind schemes, requires neither Riemann solvers (exact or approximate) nor projection of the equations along characteristic directions.The first high-order central method obtained following these lines is the secondorder Nessyahu-Tadmor scheme [28]. This scheme was based on a MUSCL-type interpolant in space (see [17]) and a midpoint quadrature to approximate the timeintegrals of the fluxes. For a related approach see [30]. Motivated by the simplicity and robustness of the second-order method, various high-order schemes, multidimensional extensions, and semidiscrete schemes have been suggested in the literature; see, e.g., [2,27,9,10,13,18,3,19,22,11,12,37] and the references therein. Central schemes have been used also for hyperbolic systems with source terms. We mention here the