Spectra that behave like power-laws are not necessarily power-laws

It is shown that measured power spectral densities (spectra) that closely resemble power-law spectra may, in fact, have mathematical forms that are not power laws in the mathematical sense. If power spectral estimates show a good fit to a straight line on a log–log plot over a finite frequency range, that is not sufficient evidence to conclude that the mathematical form of the spectrum is, in fact, a power-law over that range. It is also pointed out that to accurately fit a power-law function to experimental data using linear least squares techniques in log–log space, as is often done in practice, it is essential that the data is uniformly distributed along the abscissa in log-space (in the stochastic sense) or, otherwise, the data must be linearly interpolated onto a uniform grid to ensure that the data employed in the fitting procedure is equally weighted along the abscissa. These two important points are not widely appreciated by researchers in the field and the pitfalls associated with commonly used fitting techniques are often overlooked in the analysis of solar wind data.