Proper orthogonal modes(POMs)obtained through proper orthogonal decomposition(POD),as a statistical pattern analysis technique,have been physically demonstrated to represent the dominant structure of the dynamic response data in previous study.In this study,a novel POMs-based damage identification approach for shear flame is proposed.First,POMs of acceleration dynamic responses of a shear frame under Gauss White Noise(GWN)acceleration are acquired using singular value decomposition; Then,the first order POM is used to identify the damage through least square optimization algorithm.The results of numerical study demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.