Where infrared.city fits
3,204,804 simulations run on Infrared Core (as of 29 Oct 2026).
infrared.city runs 12 models from one engine, Infrared Core, among them wind, wind comfort, sun, daylight, radiant heat and felt heat (UTCI). It works on real 3D building and terrain meshes, in a browser app, through an API and SDK, and in plugins for Grasshopper, QGIS and ArcGIS. Felt heat for 1 km² takes about 5 s once the geometry is uploaded, and 400 km² took 44 s as four 100 km² runs in parallel. Run times are not like for like across tools: area, grid, simulated hours and physics differ. Sun, sky and radiant heat come from ray tracing. Wind comes from an AI model trained on CFD results, not from a CFD run for each request. The live layer runs a whole city every hour on a forecast. It is a climate layer: it brings the simulation results, not the twin itself.
- You need felt heat, wind comfort and sun for the plan and its options.
- You want the results inside ArcGIS: infrared.city has a plugin for ArcGIS.
- You need an hourly city layer on a weather forecast.
Use both
Plan in ArcGIS Urban. Run the climate analyses for the plan with infrared.city, and bring the results back into ArcGIS through the plugin.
Facts side by side
| infrared.city | ArcGIS Urban | |
|---|---|---|
| Runs as | Cloud: browser app, API and SDK, plugins | Web app in ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise |
| Licence and pricing | Tokens: free start with 900 tokens, plans from €240 a year | Included with ArcGIS user types |
The infrared.city values repeat the full comparison. Each value for ArcGIS Urban comes from the sources below.
Sources
- Esri: ArcGIS Urban overview , accessed 30 Oct 2026.