Spatio-temporal

The term spatio-temporal is associated with a wide area of research, which aims to provide methods and tools for analyzing the evolution of a phenomenon over a spatial and temporal domain. There are many variables that can be viewed as phenomena with a spatio-temporal variability, such as meteorological readings (temperature, humidity, pressure), hydrological parameters (permeability and hydraulic conductivity), and many measures of air, soil, and water pollution. In this context, methods for analyzing and explaining the joint spatio-temporal behavior of the above variables are necessary in order to get different goals: optimization of sampling design network, estimation at unsampled spatial locations or unsampled times and computation of maps of predicted values, assessing the uncertainty of predicted values starting from the experimental measurements, trends’ detection in space and time, particularly important to cope with risks coming from concentrations of hazardous pollutants. Hence, more and more attention is given to the spatial-temporal analysis in order to sort out these issues. The term spatio-temporal and space-time are generally used interchangeably in literature.