A nonlinear spatio-temporal system identification and analysis approach is used to study the dynamical behavior of the Belousov–Zhabotinsky (BZ) chemical reaction process. In our previous study [Guo et al., 2010],, the dynamical behavior of the BZ reaction in the spatial-temporal domain has been analyzed by identifying a coupled map lattice (CML) model of the process directly from experimental data from a real BZ reaction experiment. In this paper, the frequency domain analysis of the dynamics near equilibrium is carried out by mapping the obtained CML model into higher order spatial frequency response functions to reveal the nonlinear coupling and modulation between the various initial spectral components in the process. As far as we are aware, this is the first study of any real spatio-temporal system using a spatio-temporal domain identification and frequency domain analysis approach.