Indication of a Universal Persistence Law Governing Atmospheric Variability

We study the temporal correlations in the atmospheric variability by 14 meteorological stations around the globe, the variations of the daily maximum temperatures from their average values. We apply several methods that can systematically overcome possible nonstationarities in the data. We find that the persistence, characterized by the correlation C(s) of temperature variations separated by s days, approximately decays $C\left(s\right)\sim s^{-\gamma }$, with roughly the same exponent $\gamma \cong 0.7$ for all stations considered. The range of this universal persistence law seems to exceed one decade, and is possibly even larger than the range of the temperature series considered.