Abstract
Central to temporal Geographical Information systems (GIS) research is representation and analysis of temporality in spatial databases. Temporality can be characterized by change, motion, and periodicity, but to date, most temporal GIS research advances contribute to representing and analyzing spatially discrete constructs of amandant vectors, geospatial lifelines, space–time trajectories, events and network flows, none of which accounts for geographic phenomena that are continuously dispersing or propagating in space and time. This article introduces a temporal GIS framework that adopts concepts of fluid kinematics and uses velocity as the basic unit of spatiotemporal representation to identify kinematic flows and features indicative of geographic processes, such as divergence and convergence. Climate projections of IPCC A2 scenario are used to test the proposed kinematic representation by comparing data outputs from two popular General Circulation Models (GCMs): the Center National Weather Research global ocean-atmosphere-coupled system (CNRM-CM3) in France and the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Climate System Model (NCAR-CCSM3) in the United States. The case study shows that fluid kinematics approach offers an alternative means to time-stamped, change-based or event-based representations of geographic phenomena and provides a new foundation for GIS analysis of space–time fields. Specifically, the proposed GIS framework enables direct manipulation of velocity to reveal flows. The case study identifies distinct regions of rapid isotherm movement. By comparison, both GCMs identify similar regions of convergence and divergence except for the following: a high-latitude region in southern Greenland, a band of regions at −15° latitude extending from the middle of South America to east of Madagascar, a region over the Arabian Sea, a region over Indonesia, and several regions in the tropical oceans.
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