infrared.city in QGIS

Step 2: Connect your account

The plugin authenticates using an API key tied to your infrared.city account. Grab it from the web app under Account → API Keys → Generate a key.

Back in QGIS, open the infrared.city panel and paste the key into the API Key field. Once it's accepted, your token balance and account are linked and ready to run simulations.

Step 3: What's inside the plugin

The QGIS plugin panel is organized around a few core pieces:

API Key

Links the plugin to your account and draws from your token balance whenever a simulation runs.

Fetch geometry

Opens a dialog where you set the center longitude and latitude. Fetching pulls building geometry for that area from OpenStreetMap and adds it to your Layers panel as a new vector layer, ready to use as the basis for a simulation.

Fetch ground material

Shows the selected area (in tiles) and, once fetched, adds one editable layer per ground-surface type (asphalt, concrete, vegetation, soil, water, and building), each named 'ground-material'. Note that 'ground-vegetation' covers green surfaces like grass and parks; trees are handled separately as their own 'tree-*' point layers, defined in the Tree Catalog below.

Tree Catalog

Where you define the vegetation used in a run: species, height, and crown size. Needed any time trees are part of the simulation.

Area selection

Defines the extent of your simulation: draw a rectangle on the canvas or use your current map extent, depending on what your plugin version supports.

Run Simulation

Sends the project to infrared.city's backend and returns results as a new raster layer with a legend, added directly to your Layers panel.

Step 4: Setting up and running an analysis

You'll need building geometry in your project before running anything. The fastest route is fetching it straight from OpenStreetMap: the plugin can pull building footprints for your selected area automatically. You can also bring in your own footprint or context layers if you're working from project-specific data.

NOTE: No building geometry in the simulation area means the run will fail.

NOTE: To run a simulation, make sure the building layer is selected in the layers panel, not the tree layer or a simulation result layer.

Set your simulation extent, confirm buildings have loaded (they'll typically highlight).

Then open Run Simulation, pick your simulation type, set your parameters, and run. Results land back in your Layers panel within seconds, as a raster layer complete with its own colour legend.

Step 5: Layering in trees

To bring vegetation into the simulation, create a new point layer and position the points. Name the layer 'tree' or a variation of it. To do this, in Layer tab find New Shapefile Layer. There fill the file name, set geometry type to Point, and click OK.

Once your trees are positioned, open the Tree Catalog panel to assign species, height, and crown dimensions, save.

Add the tree layer into your next Run Simulation call. The output returns as its own layer, showing how the vegetation shifts the microclimate compared to your baseline run.

TIP: Run the same simulation twice with two different tree species in the catalog: the side-by-side comparison makes the impact of species choice on solar radiation (or any other metric) immediately visible.

Step 6: Edit ground materials

Use the Fetch ground material component to source ground materials for the selected location.

Each material can be edited using the yellow pencil toggle, letting you assign different shapes and areas to different materials. In simulations such as thermal comfort index and thermal comfort statistics, you can use the generated version of the materials or your edited version.

TIP: Try different materials in the same areas to analyse their impact on thermal comfort index and thermal comfort statistics.