Temporal GIS research has historically focused on change, motion, and events. This research introduces a framework to represent concepts of fluid kinematics with the emphasis on the concept of flows. General circulation models (GCMs) and other spatially explicit environmental models produce massive time series of geographic fields (e.g. temperature) that call for effective GIS approaches to elicit temporal information embedded in these model outputs. Common temporal GIS approaches with discrete constructs in space and time tend to overlook the spatiotemporal continuity that is fundamental to the understanding of geographic dynamic fields, such as temperature. Common methods of analyzing climatological characteristics center on trend analysis at fixed locations or monitoring meteorological phenomena, such as storm tracks, to evaluate circulation changes. The proposed temporal GIS framework, on the other hand, uses the velocity of virtual particles with fixed climatological values to capture changes in scalar continuous fields. The resulting spatiotemporal distributions of velocity suggest kinematic flows that can be used to recognize features indicative of geographic processes, such as divergence and convergence of isolines. Summative characterizations of these kinematic features highlight the embedded change and motion in these temporal sets of scalar fields and facilitate understanding and comparing model outputs
