The Jenkinson-Collison weather typing scheme (JC-WT) is an automated method used to classify the regional atmospheric circulation into a reduced number of typical recurrent patterns, identified in the early 1970ies on the basis of expert knowledge. Originally developed for the British Isles, the method since then has seen many applications. Encouraged by the estimate that the JC-WT approach can in principle be applied to any mid-to-high latitude region(Jones et al, 2013), the present study explores whether it can be used anywhere in the extratropics, including the Southern Hemisphere. To this aim, JC-WT is applied at each grid-box of a global 2.5° regular grid excluding the inner tropics ( ± 5° band) where the method cannot be applied. Thereby, 6-hourly JC-WT catalogues are obtained for 5 distinct reanalyses, covering the period 1979-2005, which are then applied to explore 1) the method's limits of applicability and 2) observational uncertainties inherent to reanalysis datasets. Using evaluation criteria such as the diversity of occurring circulation types and the frequency of unclassified situations, we extract empirically derived applicability thresholds which suggest that JC-WT can be generally used anywhere polewards of 22.5°. Seasonal variations compromise this finding along the equatorward limits of the domain, and so does the effect of large orographic barriers such as the Tibetan Plateau, the Andes, Greenland and Antarctica. In some regions, the JC-WT classifications obtained from the distinct reanalyses substantially differ from each other and this should be taken into account by further applications of the method.