New results from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 ( CMIP5 ) and multiple global reanalysis datasets are used to investigate the relationship between the mean and standard deviation (SD) in the surface air temperature (SAT) at intra‐ and inter‐annual timescales. A combination of a land–sea mask and orographic filter was used to investigate the geographic region with the strongest correlation and in all cases this was found to be for low‐lying over‐land locations. This result is consistent with the expectation that differences in the effective heat capacity of the atmosphere are an important factor in determining the SAT response to forcing.
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Davy et al. (2013) studied this question.