“…We emphasize here, our approach to studying the existence of a Virgin Islands’ climatic shift seeks to account for the fact that the temporal “abruptness” classifying a climate shift remains clouded in literature, while the tropical Atlantic‐Pacific teleconnection has been suggested as non‐stationary (e.g., Jia et al, ; Rodriguez‐Fonseca et al, ). Specifically, we devise a novel method, which builds upon past works (e.g., Ebbesmeyer et al, ; Kerr, ; Rodionov, ; ), to elucidate its temporal expanse by exploiting mathematical techniques designed to ascertain more realistic uncertainties (e.g., see Press et al, ; Pevtsov et al, ; Orange et al, ). As such, throughout the remainder of this article we refer to it interchangeably as a “shift” or “transition.” We also highlight that the additional benefits of our use of segmented periods to study the Virgin Islands’ recent climate variability, are that they present, first, a vantage point from which the Virgin Islands’ climate fluctuations about the 1980s can be studied, and second, a mathematically independent approximation of the temporal error distribution in the local region’s derived climatic shift/transition.…”