The Effective Number of Spatial Degrees of Freedom of a Time-Varying Field

TLDR

The study systematically reviews two simple measures of the effective number of spatial degrees of freedom (ESDOF) to encourage broader application. The authors detail two ESDOF estimators—one matching the mean and variance of the field’s squared anomaly to a chi‑squared distribution, and another based on EOF variance partitioning—along with guidance on estimation with limited samples, nonnormal data, and applications to correlation significance testing. They demonstrate that using a suitable combination of the two ESDOF measures yields approximately valid significance tests for differences or correlations between field realizations.

Abstract

The authors systematically investigate two easily computed measures of the effective number of spatial degrees of freedom (ESDOF), or number of independently varying spatial patterns, of a time-varying field of data. The first measure is based on matching the mean and variance of the time series of the spatially integrated squared anomaly of the field to a chi-squared distribution. The second measure, which is equivalent to the first for a long time sample of normally distributed field values, is based on the partitioning of variance between the EOFs. Although these measures were proposed almost 30 years ago, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive discussion of them that may help promote their more widespread use. The authors summarize the theoretical basis of the two measures and considerations when estimating them with a limited time sample or from nonnormally distributed data. It is shown that standard statistical significance tests for the difference or correlation between two realizations of a field (e.g., a forecast and an observation) are approximately valid if the number of degrees of freedom is chosen using an appropriate combination of the two ESDOF measures. Also described is a method involving ESDOF for deciding whether two time-varying fields are significantly correlated to each other. A discussion of the parallels between ESDOF and the effective sample size of an autocorrelated time series is given, and the authors review how an appropriate measure of effective sample size can be computed for assessing the significance of correlations between two time series.