About Windfield
Windfield shows how wind actually moves over real terrain: up ridges, down valleys, around buildings, at any height, from your own inputs or from live weather. It is free, open, and runs entirely in a web page.
What it is
Windfield is a terrain-wind platform. Draw an area anywhere on Earth, choose how the wind should start, and the service builds a real elevation model of that ground, solves the wind field over it in three dimensions, and draws the result back on the map: streamlines that bend around a peak, particles that pour down a gully, rising and sinking air, the speed at 2 m or 300 m above the ground, a cross-section through a ridge, and a full 3D view you can fly through and probe at any point in space.
What it does
- Simulate. One wind for the area, or several observation points, with vegetation, mesh detail, time of day and air stability.
- Current conditions. Live weather for the area from NOAA National Weather Service stations, airport reports worldwide, buoys, radiosonde balloons and model analysis at every level of the atmosphere; run the model from what is happening right now.
- Forecast. NOAA forecast grids (GFS worldwide, HRRR and NAM over the United States) drive the wind hour by hour, with a time player.
- Structures. Draw buildings, walls, towers or any shape, give them a height or make them infinitely tall, and see how the flow responds.
- Two solvers. A fast mass-conserving solver for hills, valleys and mountains in seconds, and a high-fidelity momentum solver (OpenFOAM) that resolves wakes, eddies and recirculation behind sharp objects in minutes.
- Heights and the third dimension. Results at any height above the ground, altitude slices above sea level, a 3D volume with eddy, recirculation and convergence overlays, and a cross-section tool.
- Keep and share. Save your setup as a small file and load it later, or share a link that rebuilds the run exactly. Download every result as GeoTIFF, KMZ, shapefile, ASCII grid, VTK or CSV.
- Open API. Everything the page does is available as a documented JSON API, free, with no key. See the Guide.
What runs where
Your browser draws the map, your area and the results. Everything heavy happens on our server: downloading elevation data, building the terrain mesh, burning in your structures, running the solver, and preparing the images and grids. Runs are queued so one busy moment cannot slow everyone down, and results are kept only while you have the page open.
Under the hood
Windfield stands on open science and open data. The terrain comes from AWS Terrain Tiles (SRTM, USGS 3DEP, GMTED and ETOPO1). The fast solver is WindNinja, a diagnostic wind model from the USDA Forest Service's Missoula Fire Sciences Lab, used in wildland fire behaviour and smoke modelling; the high-fidelity solver is OpenFOAM through WindNinja's momentum path. Live weather comes from Open-Meteo and NOAA networks; forecasts from NOAA NOMADS; place search from OpenStreetMap Nominatim; basemaps from OpenStreetMap, OpenTopoMap and Esri. Full attribution and licences are on the Credits page.
Heights, plainly
Unless you choose an altitude slice, every height in Windfield is measured above the ground at that spot and follows the terrain. A "10 m" map on a mountain is the wind ten metres above the slope everywhere, which is what a person standing there feels. The 3D view also offers flat altitude slices above sea level, and labels each clearly.
Limits
Every run is budgeted by grid cells, run time and memory rather than by a fixed area, so a large area at coarse detail and a small area at fine detail are both fine. The page shows a live estimate before you run and offers the coarsest setting that fits if a custom mesh is too fine.
- Up to two runs process at once, up to twenty queued, two in flight per visitor; the page shows your place in the queue.
- Results live only while you keep the page open, about five minutes after you leave; share links and saved files rebuild the run instead of pointing at stored files.
- The fast solver does not produce eddies or recirculation; choose the high-fidelity solver for buildings, cliffs and anything where the wake matters.
Results are a model, not a forecast. Windfield estimates a physically plausible wind field for the inputs and terrain it is given. With live weather or a forecast it is only as good as those sources. Use it for planning and understanding, never as the sole basis for a life-safety decision.
Who it is for
Backcountry travellers and avalanche professionals reading wind loading on a slope. Wildland fire crews and planners. Pilots, paraglider and drone operators. Builders and architects asking how a structure changes the air around it. Researchers and students who want a real solver without installing one. Anyone curious about why the wind does what it does on a particular hill.
Free and open
No accounts, no paywall, no tracking, no feature gating. Windfield is a SummitFlux project and is free for the time being.