Comparison of the Atmospheric 200 hPa Jet’s Analyses between Proper Orthogonal Decomposition and Advanced Dynamic Mode Decomposition Method

Abstract

In this paper, a frequently employed technique named the sparsity-promoting dynamic mode decomposition (SPDMD) is proposed to analyze the velocity fields of atmospheric motion. The dynamic mode decomposition method (DMD) is an effective technique to extract dynamic information from flow fields that is generated from direct experiment measurements or numerical simulation and has been broadly employed to study the dynamics of the flow, to achieve a reduced-order model (ROM) of the complex high dimensional flow field, and even to predict the evolution of the flow in a short time in the future. However, for standard DMD, it is hard to determine which modes are the most physically relevant, unlike the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) method which ranks the decomposed modes according to their energy content. The advanced modal decomposition method SPDMD is a variant of the standard DMD, which is capable of determining the modes that can be used to achieve a high-quality approximation of the given field. It is novel to introduce the SPDMD to analyze the atmospheric flow field. In this study, SPDMD is applied to extract essential dynamic information from the 200 hPa jet flow, and the decomposed results are compared with the POD method. To further demonstrate the extraction effect of POD/SPDMD methods on the 200 hPa jet flow characteristics, the POD/SPDMD reduced-order models are constructed, respectively. The results show that both modal decomposition methods successfully extract the underlying coherent structures from the 200 hPa jet flow. And the DMD method provides additional information on the modal properties, such as temporal frequency and growth rate of each mode which can be used to identify the stability of the modes. It is also found that a fewer order of modes determined by the SPDMD method can capture nearly the same dynamic information of the jet flow as the POD method. Furthermore, from the quantitative comparisons between the POD and SPDMD reduced-order models, the latter provides a higher precision than the former, especially when the number of modes is small.