I finally got around to reproducing the DINEOF method (Beckers and Rixon, 2003) for optimizing EOF analysis on gappy data fields - it is especially useful for remote sensing data where cloud cover can result in large gaps in data. Their paper gives a nice overview of some of the various methods that have been used for such data sets. One of these approaches, which I have written about before, involves deriving EOFs from a covariance matrix as calculated from available data. Unfortunately, as the author's point out, such covariance matrices are no longer positive-definite, which can lead to several problems. The DINEOF method seems to overcome several of these issues.
