Everyone should consider the possibility that for some indices, North Atlantic correlations (in correlation maps) are depressed
by the North Atlantic's sensitivity (being the smaller northern basin surrounded
by a lot of land / ice, resulting «higher continentality»), which gives it a propensity towards high amplitude oscillations, including decadal - timescale
nonlinear trends.
The EMD approach is used to extract physically meaningful modes and
nonlinear trends from
nonlinear and non-stationary time series that can not be captured
by a linear least - square fit.