The spatiotemporal dynamics of Lyapunov vectors (LVs) in spatially extended chaotic systems is studied by means of coupled-map lattices. We determine intrinsic length scales and spatiotemporal correlations of LVs corresponding to the leading unstable
directions by translating the problem to the language of scale-invariant growing surfaces. We find that the so-called characteristic LVs exhibit spatial localization, strong clustering around given spatiotemporal loci, and remarkable dynamic scaling properties of the corresponding surfaces. In contrast, the commonly used backward LVs (obtained through Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization) spread all over the system and do not exhibit dynamic scaling due to artifacts in the dynamical correlations by construction.
