Evaluation of decomposition tools for sea floor pressure data: A practical comparison of modern and classical approaches

In recent years more and more long-term broadband data sets are collected in geosciences. Therefore there is an urgent need of algorithms which semi-automatically analyze and decompose these data into components which are associated with different processes. In the past, the standard tools for decomposing data sets were based on either the Fourier or the Wavelet Transform. In this paper we investigate the novel approaches Empirical Mode Decomposition and Sparse Decomposition as well as the Harmonic and Wavelet Decomposition for long-term sea floor pressure data analysis. In a comparative investigation conducted with Matlab ® these tools were applied to real and synthetic sea floor pressure data sets. Our results indicate that none of the methods is entirely suited for this objective, but Sparse Decomposition performs best except for computing efficiency.