Design better spaces with climate insights.

ERA5-Land is a global reanalysis dataset published by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. It provides hourly historical temperature, precipitation, wind, humidity, and radiation on a ~9 km grid, reconstructed by running a modern weather model over observational records back to 1950.

jifto uses ERA5-Land to build a high-resolution baseline for the selected location: the typical temperature range, the shape of the wind rose, the distribution of rainfall intensity, and seasonal patterns that weather stations alone can miss.

The Interactive Climate Atlas is a public service of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the European Union's climate programme. It hosts the gridded regional climate projections that describe how temperature, precipitation, and extreme events evolve under different emissions scenarios.

jifto uses these datasets to contextualise a site against broader trends – how much warmer summers are expected to be, how winter precipitation is shifting, how extreme events are becoming more frequent.

SSP2-4.5 is one of the "Shared Socioeconomic Pathways" used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It represents a "middle of the road" future in which emissions slowly decline but not steeply enough to meet the 1.5 °C Paris target – close to the trajectory most public planning frameworks currently assume.

jifto applies SSP2-4.5 as the default 2050 design horizon. The same study can be re-run against present-day conditions or other scenarios to compare performance across climate futures.

jifto resolves building data by location: a city-level source takes precedence over a national one, a national one over the global fallback. Most national and city sources provide LOD2 geometry with actual roof forms, which matters for sun, shadow, and wind around streets and courtyards.

Global

OpenStreetMap (OSM)

Collaborative, openly licensed map of the world. Provides footprints and height attributes in most urban areas; the default fallback everywhere.

Overture Maps

OSM-derived building data served as GeoParquet from Azure. Same geometry as OSM with no rate limits and roughly a hundred times faster to fetch.

National (LOD2, authoritative)

Germany – basemap.de 3D

Federal LOD2 service maintained by the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG); covers all of Germany.

Germany (Baden-Württemberg) – LGL-BW 3D Tiles

Higher-detail regional service from the Landesamt für Geoinformation und Landentwicklung; takes precedence over basemap.de inside Baden-Württemberg.

Switzerland – swisstopo SwissBuildings3D

Official federal 3D buildings served as 3D Tiles (B3DM) by the Federal Office of Topography.

Netherlands – 3D BAG

National LOD2 service from TU Delft and the Dutch Kadaster, distributed as CityJSON tiles; LOD 2.2 roof geometry.

Japan – Project PLATEAU

Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) open 3D city programme; per-city LOD2 B3DM tilesets.

Estonia – Maa-amet LOD2

National LOD2 buildings from the Estonian Land Board, served via ArcGIS I3S SceneServer.

Czech Republic (Prague) – IPR Praha

City-authority dataset from the Prague Institute of Planning and Development; I3S SceneServer with LOD2 geometry.

Singapore – OneMap 3D

Official Singapore 3D Tiles buildings service.

City sources

Austria – Vienna Stadtplan3D

City of Vienna 3D Tiles (B3DM) buildings.

Netherlands – Rotterdam 3D

Municipal LOD2 from Virtual City Systems; overrides 3D BAG within Rotterdam.

Spain – Barcelona & Madrid

Ajuntament de Barcelona and Ayuntamiento de Madrid LOD2 I3S services.

France – Lyon

CityGML-sourced LOD2 textured buildings served via I3S.

United States – NYC, Washington DC, Boston

NYC DoITT (all five boroughs, ~1.1 million buildings), CyberCity3D for DC, Boston Planning & Development Agency for Boston.

Terrain is selected the same way as buildings: the highest-resolution national source is used where available, with ESRI Terrain 3D as the global fallback. The sub-metre national datasets are derived from airborne LiDAR surveys and are kept up to date by the respective mapping agencies.

Global

ESRI Terrain 3D

Global ground elevation aggregated from national surveys and satellite-derived DEMs. Typical resolution ~1.6 – 2 m in populated regions.

National & regional

Denmark – DHM / Danmarks Højdemodel

0.4 m Digital Terrain Model from Dataforsyningen; LiDAR-derived bare-earth surface.

Netherlands – AHN4

0.5 m national DTM from Actueel Hoogtebestand Nederland, served via PDOK.

Switzerland – swissALTI3D

0.5 m Swisstopo DTM distributed as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs via STAC.

Germany (Baden-Württemberg) – LGL-BW DGM025

0.25 m DTM from the LGL-BW open-data portal; the highest-resolution terrain dataset currently available in jifto.

Germany (Lower Saxony) – LGLN DGM1

1 m DTM from LGLN, served as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs.

Germany – open DGM1 (federal states)

1 m DTMs from individual federal-state WCS endpoints; ESRI Terrain 3D fills in states without open coverage.

Individual tree points contribute to sunlight, shadow, and microclimate studies through their canopy porosity and height. jifto currently imports tree locations from public crowdsourced data, with parametric canopy geometry assigned per species or type.

Overture Maps Trees

Global tree points served as GeoParquet, derived from the same underlying OSM data but with no rate limits and substantially faster fetching. Default source where available.

OpenStreetMap trees

Fallback source via the Overpass API; used when Overture returns no results for a tile.

OptiX is a ray-tracing framework from NVIDIA that runs on consumer and professional GPUs. It can cast millions of rays in parallel, which is exactly what sunlight, shadow, and visibility studies need – each point in the analysis grid has to check line of sight against every relevant piece of context geometry.

jifto uses OptiX for sun-hour accumulation, shadow projection, and view-cone studies. Problems that used to require hours of CPU compute run in seconds, which makes iterative design exploration practical rather than end-of-project verification.

The lattice-Boltzmann method is a computational fluid-dynamics technique well suited to GPU parallelisation. Instead of solving the classical Navier – Stokes equations on a fitted mesh, it simulates fluid as a collision-and-streaming process on a uniform grid – a form that maps efficiently to the stream-processing architecture of a GPU.

jifto uses this method to stream live pedestrian-wind fields directly into the Rhino viewport as the solver converges. The designer sees the flow develop around the geometry in real time, which turns wind analysis from a batch simulation into an interactive design tool.

The Universal Thermal Climate Index is an international model for outdoor thermal comfort developed by the European COST Action 730 scientific commission. It combines air temperature, mean radiant temperature, wind speed, and humidity into a single "feels-like" temperature.

UTCI values are categorised into comfort bands – no thermal stress, moderate heat stress, strong heat stress, cold stress, and so on – which makes results directly actionable for public-realm and open-space design.

A Europe-wide standard that sets minimum daylight levels for habitable rooms. It defines how much direct sun and daylight a living space should receive to qualify as comfortable and usable, and is increasingly written into national building codes as the default daylight benchmark.

A legal framework rather than a design standard. It protects existing buildings from losing daylight due to adjacent new development; a new scheme has to demonstrate that it does not reduce a neighbour's daylight below an acceptable threshold. Commonly evaluated using the BRE overshadowing and vertical-sky-component tests.

Scandinavian building codes have long relied on the classical daylight factor – the ratio of indoor to outdoor diffuse daylight under an overcast CIE sky – as the primary daylight metric. The detailed threshold varies by country: Sweden's Boverket building regulations (BBR) target a minimum daylight factor in habitable rooms, Norway's TEK regulations require that each habitable room receives adequate daylight, and Denmark's BR18 has aligned with EN 17037 directly.

jifto reports both the classical daylight factor and the EN 17037 metrics where requested, so projects can be checked against the national framework that actually applies.

The most widely adopted pedestrian wind-comfort standard, used in planning submissions across the UK, Australia, and increasingly the Middle East and Asia. It classifies each public space by what activity its wind conditions allow – sitting, standing, walking – and flags where wind would make an intended use unpleasant or unsafe.

The Dutch national standard for outdoor wind. It evaluates both comfort (how often wind makes a public space unpleasant) and safety (how often wind reaches levels that could knock over a pedestrian), so a building can be compliant on one criterion and fail on the other.

Originally developed for the London Docklands, now referenced for dense urban contexts where the Lawson thresholds are considered too permissive. It applies stricter limits designed to reduce the frequency and duration of uncomfortable wind at ground level.

The Universal Thermal Climate Index was developed by the European COST Action 730 scientific commission and is the standard reference for outdoor thermal comfort in contemporary public-realm and climate-adaptation briefs. It combines air temperature, mean radiant temperature, wind speed, and humidity into a single "feels-like" temperature and classifies the result into comfort bands.

jifto uses the bands commonly cited in outdoor-comfort specifications: no thermal stress (9 – 26 °C), moderate heat stress (26 – 32 °C), strong heat stress (32 – 38 °C), and cold stress (below 9 °C).

Published by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, ASHRAE 55 is the most widely cited thermal-comfort standard for indoor environments. It defines the combinations of temperature, humidity, and air movement at which most building occupants report comfort, and is referenced by most green-building certification systems and many national codes.

Germany's Federal Water Act (Wasserhaushaltsgesetz, WHG) sets the principle that precipitation should be managed near where it falls. The technical detail is provided by the guidelines of the German Association for Water, Wastewater and Waste (DWA) – notably DWA-A 102 on planning rainwater management and DWA-A 117 on sizing retention and detention structures. Many municipalities require projects to demonstrate compliance with these guidelines as part of the planning submission.

jifto's surface-runoff results feed directly into those conversations: where does water pond, how fast does it move, and how much storage does the site need before discharge can begin.

Local planning authorities specify the design-storm return period a project must handle – typically a 10-year, 50-year, or 100-year event, depending on how critical the site is. The rainfall intensity for that return period comes from regional IDF curves published by the national meteorological service or water board.

jifto takes that intensity as a user input; the reported runoff, ponding, and velocity results describe how the graded surface responds to that storm.