A proper orthogonal decomposition of a simulated supersonic shear layer

The Karhunen–Loève procedure is applied to the analysis of an ensemble of snapshots obtained from a conditionally sampled localized shear layer simulation. The computed set of optimal basis functions is used to economically characterize sampled flow realizations. Pictorially it is seen that the essential features (and roughly 80% of the energy) of typical flows are captured by retaining roughly 10–20 parameters in the expansion. Smaller‐scale features are resolved by retaining more terms in the series.