Proper orthogonal decomposition in wind engineering. Part 1: A state-of-the-art and some prospects

The Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) is a statistical method particularly suitable and versatile for dealing with many problems concerning wind engineering and several other scientific and humanist fields. POD represents a random process as a linear combination of deterministic functions, the POD modes, modulated by uncorrelated random coefficients, the principal components. It owes its popularity to the property that only few terms of the series are usually needed to capture the most energetic coherent structures of the process, and a link often exists between each dominant mode and the main mechanisms of the phenomenon. For this reason, POD modes are normally used to identify low-dimensional subspaces appropriate for the construction of reduced models. This paper provides a state-of-the-art and some prospects on POD, with special regard to its framework and applications in wind engineering. A wide bibliography is also reported.