In general, MATLAB would not be able to parse that syntax, because it could not predict that you want exactly one column per variable (as opposed to, say, two columns to temperature and one to index, etc.).
However, it is easy to write a function to do what you want:
function [varargout] = matrixToColumnVectors(X)
ncol = size(X,2);
for nc = 1:ncol
varargout(nc) = {X(:,nc)};
end
end
Usage example:
>> x = rand(7,3);
>> [x1,x2,x3] = matrixToColumnVectors(x)
