Bispectral unfolding of the skewness of correlated additive and multiplicative noise processes.

Abstract

Correlated additive and multiplicative (CAM) noise processes are well-established as general "null hypothesis" models of non-Gaussian variability in atmospheric and oceanic quantities. In this study, analytic expressions for the bispectral density (which partitions the third statistical moment into triad frequency interactions in a manner analogous to the partitioning of variance by the spectral density) are developed for discrete and continuous-time CAM processes. It is then demonstrated that under lowpass filtering, while the absolute skewness of a discrete-time CAM process may increase or decrease with decreasing cutoff frequency, the absolute skewness of continuous-time CAM processes decreases monotonically. This second result provides a test to assess the degree to which an observed time series is consistent with continuous-time CAM dynamics.