Red noise and regime shifts

The analysis of interdecadal physical and biological variability is made challenging by the relative shortness of available time series. It has been suggested that rapid temporal changes of the most energetic empirical orthogonal function of North Pacific sea surface temperature (sometimes called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO) represents a “regime shift” between states with otherwise stable statistics. Using random independent time series generated to have the same frequency content as the PDO, we show that a composite analysis of climatic records recently used to identify regime shifts is likely to find them in Gaussian, red noise with stationary statistics. Detection of a shift by this procedure is not evidence of nonlinear processes leading to bi-stable behavior or any other meaningful regime shift.