Is a Harrison-Zeldovich power spectrum compatible with the Tenerife cosmic microwave background experiment?

We analyze whether the large variance of the temperature held measured by the Tenerife experiment can be obtained by sampling an active region of a cosmic microwave sky characterized by a matter power spectrum with slope n = 1. We employ the technique of constrained realizations of Gaussian random fields to generate sky maps, smoothed to COBE Differential Microwave Radiometer scales, containing a hot spot at a prespecified location. We show that when Tenerife is normalized to Q(rms-PS) = 20 mu K, the high variance can be explained at the 68% confidence level as originating from a 2.5 sigma or larger deviation from a scale-invariant power spectrum.