Summary
The study addresses some methodological issues of application of principal component analysis (PCA) to the classification of circulation patterns. The obliquely rotated PCA in T-mode (i.e. with time observations corresponding to variables and grid points to realizations) is applied to 500 hPa geopotential heights over Europe and adjacent parts of Atlantic Ocean. The solutions are examined for various numbers of principal components rotated, and for both raw and anomaly data, with the aim to find the way of determining the optimum number of circulation types. This is done, among others, by examining temporal and spatial stability of solutions, their compliance with simple structure requirements, and temporal behaviour of classifications. Some of the solutions that are pre-selected according to the rule based upon the separation between successive eigenvalues prove to perform considerably better than unselected ones; some of them do not. Which pre-selected solutions should be given preference is impossible to decide in advance, without a detailed scrutiny. Nevertheless, even after such a scrutiny is done, more than a single classification are acceptable. The final choice of the optimum solution depends on the aims of the intended study: It should balance the demands on statistical stability of types and on resemblance between types and daily patterns classified with them.
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Huth, R. Properties of the circulation classification scheme based on the rotated principal component analysis. Meteorl. Atmos. Phys. 59, 217–233 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01030145
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01030145