  This article grew out of the application part of my Master's thesis at the
Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science at Ruprecht-Karls-Universit\"at
Heidelberg under the supervision of PD Dr. Andreas Ott. In the context of time
series analyses of RNA virus datasets with persistent homology, this article
introduces a new method for reducing two-dimensional persistence to
one-dimensional persistence by transforming time information into distances.
