  The identification of coherent structures from experimental or numerical data
is an essential task when conducting research in fluid dynamics. This typically
involves the construction of an empirical mode base that appropriately captures
the dominant flow structures. The most prominent candidates are the
energy-ranked proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and the frequency ranked
Fourier decomposition and dynamic mode decomposition (DMD). However, these
methods fail when the relevant coherent structures occur at low energies or at
multiple frequencies, which is often the case. To overcome the deficit of these
"rigid" approaches, we propose a new method termed Spectral Proper Orthogonal
Decomposition (SPOD). It is based on classical POD and it can be applied to
spatially and temporally resolved data. The new method involves an additional
temporal constraint that enables a clear separation of phenomena that occur at
multiple frequencies and energies. SPOD allows for a continuous shifting from
the energetically optimal POD to the spectrally pure Fourier decomposition by
changing a single parameter. In this article, SPOD is motivated from
phenomenological considerations of the POD autocorrelation matrix and justified
from dynamical system theory. The new method is further applied to three sets
of PIV measurements of flows from very different engineering problems. We
consider the flow of a swirl-stabilized combustor, the wake of an airfoil with
a Gurney flap, and the flow field of the sweeping jet behind a fluidic
oscillator. For these examples, the commonly used methods fail to assign the
relevant coherent structures to single modes. The SPOD, however, achieves a
proper separation of spatially and temporally coherent structures, which are
either hidden in stochastic turbulent fluctuations or spread over a wide
frequency range.
