Directional component analysis

Directional component analysis (DCA) is a statistical method used in climate science for identifying representative patterns of variability in space-time data-sets such as historical climate observations, weather prediction ensembles or climate ensembles. The first DCA pattern is a pattern of weather or climate variability that is both likely to occur (measured using likelihood) and has a large impact (for a specified linear impact function, and given certain mathematical conditions: see below).

Source: Wikipedia — Directional component analysis (CC BY-SA 4.0)