TIMESCAPE GLOBAL

SPACE-TIME INTERPOLATION TOOL

Abstract

Many ecological variables vary both in space and time and the datasets are often distributed far form the ideal statistical sampling: the Timescape algorithm attempts to cope with environmental sciences datasets with a scattered spatial and temporal distribution. TimescapeGlobal deals with continental to worldwide datasets, based on angular (longitude and latitude) coordinates. The evaluation of the distances with angular coordinates is arithmetically intensive and topologically tricky: TimescapeGlobal uses a simplified spherical great circle distance evaluation, which takes into account the cyclic (longitude) and singular (latitude) coordinates needs. The software offers a variety of variogram options and other descriptive statistical tools for the analysis of data distribution. The interpolation can be done with some preloaded algorithms or with any user-defined function, since the application includes a fairly extensive syntax parser. A typical run lasts some hours, depending on the complexity of the algorithm and the number of output cells.