I went through all the indicators to find out what could signal volatility. I had to combine ATR and STD and test through multiyear tick data to find what levels indicated a continuous vol spike.
Thanks Spectre2007 for this advice. All this time, I had been backtesting my trend systems and never knew or even considered to trade when the market volatility was present. I was testing using ATR for a stop loss, but never thought to use to signal when to trade the trend system