Some effects of finite sample size and persistence on meteorological statistics. Part II: potential predictability.

Potential predictability of a meteorological time series can be estimated from the ratio of the actual interannual variability to the natural variability associated with climatic noise. The extent to which this ratio is larger than one is taken as a measure of the climatic signal-to-noise variance ratio. However, there are major problems in separating out the signal from the noise which are compounded by persistence in the time series, the presence of an annual cycle and the effects of finite sample size. -from Author