Currently, most of existing data-driven modeling methods for distributed parameter systems (DPSs) are offline and do not take the intrinsic structure of streaming data into account. This often makes them difficult to model strongly nonlinear and time-varying DPSs. To overcome this, a novel modeling method that integrates the advantages of both manifold-learning-based spatial basis functions learning and temporal dynamic online modeling is proposed. In this method, the original spatiotemporal data are first mapped into high dimensional space using nonlinear mapping function, from which manifold learning is developed to obtain spatial basis functions. This allows the strongly nonlinear relationship on space able to be constructed due to nonlinear mapping, and maintaining the intrinsic data structure due to manifold learning. In addition, the online least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) is developed to construct the temporal dynamics model. This may make time-varying dynamics of DPSs able to be captured. By integrating spatial basis functions and the online LS-SVM temporal model, a spatiotemporal model is constructed, which allows for the reconstruction of time-varying and nonlinear dynamics of DPSs. The catalytic rod simulation and heating experiments not only demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, but also the better modeling ability as compared to several common modeling methods.INDEX TERMS Distributed parameter systems, strong nonlinearity, time-varying, manifold learning, LS-SVM.