Common EOFs in atmospheric science and large-scale flow

Abstract

Conventional analysis of the large-scale atmospheric variability and teleconnections are obtained using the empirical orthogonal function (EOF) method, which was developed mainly to deal with single fields. With the increase of the amount of observed/simulated large-scale atmospheric data including climate models, e.g., CMIP, there is a need to develop methods with efficient algorithms that enable analysis and comparison/validation of climate model simulations. Here we describe the common EOF method, which finds common patterns of a set of large scale atmospheric fields, and enables comparing several model outputs simultaneously. A step-wise/sequential algorithm is presented, which avoids the difficulty encountered in previous algorithms related to the lack of simultaneous monotonic change of the eigenvalues of all fields. The theory and algorithm are presented, and the application to large-scale teleconnections from various reanalysis products and CMIP6 are discussed.