Summary The last decades have seen an unprecedented increase in the availability of data sets that are inherently global and temporally evolving, from remotely sensed networks to climate model ensembles. This paper provides an overview of statistical modeling techniques for space–time processes, where space is the sphere representing our planet. In particular, we make a distintion between (a) second order‐based approaches and (b) practical approaches to modeling temporally evolving global processes. The former approaches are based on the specification of a class of space–time covariance functions, with space being the two‐dimensional sphere. The latter are based on explicit description of the dynamics of the space–time process, that is, by specifying its evolution as a function of its past history with added spatially dependent noise. We focus primarily on approach (a), for which the literature has been sparse. We provide new models of space–time covariance functions for random fields defined on spheres cross time. Practical approaches (b) are also discussed, with special emphasis on models built directly on the sphere, without projecting spherical coordinates onto the plane. We present a case study focused on the analysis of air pollution from the 2015 wildfires in Equatorial Asia, an event that was classified as the year's worst environmental disaster. The paper finishes with a list of the main theoretical and applied research problems in the area, where we expect the statistical community to engage over the next decade.

The construction of valid and flexible cross-covariance functions is a fundamental task for modeling multivariate space-time data arising from climatological and oceanographical phenomena. Indeed, a suitable specification of the covariance structure allows to capture both the space-time dependencies between the observations and the development of accurate predictions. For data observed over large portions of planet Earth it is necessary to take into account the curvature of the planet. Hence the need for random field models defined over spheres across time. In particular, the associated covariance function should depend on the geodesic distance, which is the most natural metric over the spherical surface. In this work, we propose a flexible parametric family of matrix-valued covariance functions, with both marginal and cross structure being of the Gneiting type. We additionally introduce a different multivariate Gneiting model based on the adaptation of the latent dimension approach to the spherical context. Finally, we assess the performance of our models through the study of a bivariate space-time data set of surface air temperatures and precipitations.

Space-time covariance modeling under the Lagrangian framework has been especially popular to study atmospheric phenomena in the presence of transport effects, such as prevailing winds or ocean currents, which are incompatible with the assumption of full symmetry. In this work, we assess the dimple problem (Kent et al., 2011) for covariance functions coming from transport phenomena. We work under two important cases: the spatial domain can be either the d-dimensional Euclidean space R d or the spherical shell of R d . The choice is relevant for the type of metric chosen to describe spatial dependence. In particular, in Euclidean spaces, we work under very general assumptions with the case of radial symmetry being deduced as a corollary of a more general result. We illustrate through examples that, under this framework, the dimple is a natural and physically interpretable property.

This paper considers a multivariate spatial random field, with each component having univariate marginal distributions of the skew-Gaussian type. We assume that the field is defined spatially on the unit sphere embedded in R 3 , allowing for modeling data available over large portions of planet Earth. This model admits explicit expressions for the marginal and cross covariances. However, the n-dimensional distributions of the field are difficult to evaluate, because it requires the sum of 2 n terms involving the cumulative and probability density functions of a n-dimensional Gaussian distribution. Since in this case inference based on the full likelihood is computationally unfeasible, we propose a composite likelihood approach based on pairs of spatial observations. This last being possible thanks to the fact that we have a closed form expression for the bivariate distribution. We illustrate the effectiveness of the method through simulation experiments and the analysis of a real data set of minimum and maximum surface air temperatures.

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