Statistical and modal analysis of surface pressure fluctuations in tornado-like vortices

Surface pressure measurement is a general tool for evaluating wind flow qualitatively and quantitatively. Due to its complex temporal and spatial features, modal analysis is an interesting tool to be used for interpretation and discussion. The most common technique for modal representation is proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), also referred to as principal component analysis. However, it is believed that POD sometimes fails to extract meaningful features of the pressure field. To remove the non-physical POD modes and provide a closer physical description of the pressure field, an advanced method independent component analysis (ICA) is applied. Furthermore, these two methods are generalized in the frequency domain, called dynamic POD and dynamic ICA, to provide the temporal evolutions of coherent structures over the spatial domain. Modal analysis is used to isolate the different coherent structures in tornado-like vortices, e.g., wandering, vortex breakdown, and two-cell structure, and find the spectral characteristic of each phenomenon. Moreover, a comparison of modal analysis between the current paper and the previous paper on the velocity field {see Karami et al., ["Coherent structures in tornado-like vortices," Phys. Fluids 31, 085118 (2019)]} presents new insight into the pressure-velocity correlation of the POD modes.