corr works on columns in 2D matrices.
Your local temperature is a row, so you need to tranpose it:
local_temp = local_temp.';
Your surface temperature is a 3D array with each location a vector along the third dimension. You need to permute and then flatten to make it a matrix:
surface_temp = permute(surface_temp, [3 1 2]); % permute
surface_temp = surface_temp(:,:); % flatten
corr should then work:
[rho, pval] = corr(local_temp, surface_temp);
You may want to reshape the output.
