Abstract Tropical wind fields from the U.S. Navy Global Band Analyses (GBA) are studied to depict the synoptic flow surrounding tropical cyclones. The composite fields of the zonal and meridional wind components on a grid centered on the tropical cyclone indicate physically realistic flow patterns. Scalar empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis is used to represent the zonal and meridional GBA wind component fields. The representation of these components in terms of the first 35 out of a total of 527 EOF coefficients accounts for at least 80% of the total variance and eliminates much of the noise from the fields. This truncation requires only 7% of the storage needed for the original gridpoints. The eigenvectors can be interpreted as representing different synoptic flow patterns. Statistical regression equations are derived to predict the future zonal and meridional translation of the tropical cyclone. The EOF coefficients are used as predictors to represent the synoptic information for the scheme. T...