Abstract. This paper deals with an extension of dynamic mode decomposition (DMD), which is appropriate to treat general periodic and quasi-periodic dynamics, and transients decaying to periodic and quasiperiodic attractors, including cases (not accessible to standard DMD) that show limited spatial complexity but a very large number of involved frequencies. The extension, labeled as higher order dynamic mode decomposition, uses time-lagged snapshots and can be seen as superimposed DMD in a sliding window. The new method is illustrated and clarified using some toy model dynamics, the Stuart-Landau equation, and the Lorenz system. In addition, the new method is applied to (and its robustness is tested in) some permanent and transient dynamics resulting from the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation (a paradigm of pattern forming systems), for which standard DMD is seen to only uncover trivial dynamics, and the thermal convection in a rotating spherical shell subject to a radial gravity field. Schmid [48], and has become a useful tool for postprocessing massive spatiotemporal data in numerical and experimental fluid mechanics [49,50,51,52,32] and other fields [28,40]. The ability of DMD to extract relevant patterns makes this method potentially useful in identifying nonlinear dynamics in many physical systems, but this application requires some care since the standard DMD may give completely spurious results. The main goal of this paper is to analyze the application of DMD to general (both low-dimensional and infinite-dimensional) dynamical systems, which will require a nontrivial extension of the method.In order to fix ideas, DMD applies to spatio-temporal data organized in K equispaced J-dimensional snapshots as