Abstract:
Strong empirical evidence has been presented previously that tropical Indo-Pacific sea surface temperature anomalies can be described by a stable linear process driven by stochastic forcing (Penland and Sardeshmukh, 1995). The empirical nature of that evidence has prompted some question as to whether the statistical tests used in this previous study would be able to identify nonlinearities and instabilities in the output from a numerical model where the dynamical regime is known. It is here shown that empirical tests based on Linear Inverse Modeling were unlikely to have misidentified the dynamical regime of either the model output or of the real system