Abstract: A method, executed by at least one processor, for compressing time-varying scientific data, includes receiving time-varying data corresponding to a physical phenomenon within a domain comprising one or more spatial dimensions, conducting a proper orthogonal decomposition of the time-varying data to provide basis vectors for the time-varying data, generating a set of expansion coefficients corresponding to the basis vectors that are most prominent in the time-varying data, conducting an image compression algorithm on the expansion coefficients to provide a compressed representation of the time-varying data, and storing the compressed representation of the time-varying data. The time-varying data may be numeric data generated from a physical simulation or from experimentation. In some embodiments, the time-varying data corresponds to one or more sub-domains within a larger dataset. The sub-domains may be coherent sub-domains that have similar modes.