Inspired by the Charney-and-de Vore hypothesis, Hansen and Sutera in 1986 came forward with the claim of having detected a fingerprint of the presence of two preferred state in the tropospheric circulation at northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes. Shortly after, Nitsche et al. found that this claim was premature, since it may be caused by a insufficient data base. Now, with much more data, both from reanalyses and from extended control runs with earth System models, we have revisited this case, and found no evidence of such bimodality, when using the original metric.

Following the principle that lack of evidence is not evidence of lacking reality, it may be possible to detect footprints of multimodality with different metrics, and we are not making any claims of that sort, even if the literature provides little evidence of the success of alternative metrics.

Our result has a dual significance, namely first for our understanding of atmospheric dynamics, and secondly of the ubiquitous temptations of the Zeitgeist.

受 Charney-and-de Vore 假说的启发，Hansen 和 Sutera 于 1986 年提出声称在北半球中纬度的对流层环流中检测到存在两种优选状态的指纹。不久之后，Nitsche 等人。发现这种说法为时过早，因为它可能是由于数据库不足造成的。现在，有了更多来自重新分析和地球系统模型扩展控制运行的数据，我们重新审视了这个案例，在使用原始指标时没有发现这种双峰性的证据。

遵循缺乏证据并不是缺乏现实的证据的原则，有可能用不同的指标检测多模态的足迹，我们不会做出任何此类声明，即使文献几乎没有提供替代方案成功的证据指标。

我们的结果具有双重意义，首先是我们对大气动力学的理解，其次是时代精神无处不在的诱惑。