Modal decomposition techniques are important tools for the analysis of unsteady flows and, in order to provide meaningful insights with respect to coherent structures and their characteristic frequencies, the modes must possess a robust spatial support. In this context, although widely used, methods based on singular value decomposition (SVD) may produce modes that are difficult to interpret when applied to problems dominated by intermittent and transient events. Fortunately, specific modal decomposition techniques have been recently developed to analyze such problems, but a proper comparison between them is still lacking from the literature. Therefore, this work compares two recent methods: the fast adaptive multivariate empirical mode decomposition (FA-MVEMD) and the multiresolution dynamic mode decomposition (mrDMD). These techniques are employed here for the study of flow databases involving …