Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis

Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis is often used in Meteorology and Climatology

In statistics and signal processing, the method of empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis is a decomposition of a signal or data set in terms of orthogonal basis functions which are determined from the data. It is the same as performing a principal components analysis on the data, except that the EOF method finds both time series and spatial patterns. The term is also interchangeable with the geographically weighted PCAs in geophysics.