Volatility in atmospheric temperature variability

Using detrended fluctuation analysis, we study the scaling properties of the volatility time series Vi=|Ti+1−Ti| of daily temperatures Ti for 10 chosen sites around the globe. We find that the volatility is long-range power-law correlated with an exponent γ close to 0.8 for all sites considered here. We use this result to test the scaling performance of several state-of-the art global climate models and find that the models do not reproduce the observed scaling behavior.