A broad class of partially coherent non-stationary fields can be expressed in terms of the recently proposed independent-elementary-pulse model. In this work we first introduce a corresponding dual representation in the frequency domain and then extend this concept by considering shifted and weighted elementary spectral coherence functions. We prove that this method, which closely describes practical optical systems, leads to properly defined correlation functions. As an example, we demonstrate that our new model characterizes, in a natural way, trains of ultra-short pulses, affected by noise and timing jitter, emitted by usual modulators employed in telecom applications.